


reach my hands out in the dark

by allandmore99



Series: like lovers do [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artificial Insemination, Booker/Therapy, Canon-Typical Violence, Families of Choice, Forced Insemination, Forced Pregnancy, Forgiveness, Found Family, In terms of the medical procedures in Kozak’s lab, Mpreg, Multi, Nothing non consensual between the main characters, Omega Booker, Pregnancy, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:47:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 35,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27777109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allandmore99/pseuds/allandmore99
Summary: Booker’s biology chooses the exact wrong moment to resurface, but in the end one of the team’s lowest moments may bring them closer together.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: like lovers do [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144163
Comments: 126
Kudos: 304





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for two kinkmeme prompts—one about Booker having been particularly tormented about his sons’ deaths because he had given birth to them himself; another asking for Kozak artificially inseminating of omega! Booker in the lab.
> 
> Kozak is canon-levels of awful and then some in this first chapter and Booker definitely doesn’t consent to the artificial insemination, nor does the team consent to give her any kind of samples, but a happy ending is definitely guaranteed and there shouldn’t be any more non-con (or even dub-con elements) after this chapter.

Nicky was so blinded by his anger that he couldn’t see it at first, didn’t notice the way the scent in the room had shifted, subtly at first and then dramatically. Joe didn’t notice either, so focused on his Nicky and trying to figure out how they were going to get out of the lab, but Andy just took one look over at Booker and her head thunked back against the examination table, exhausted.

“Another thing you’ve been keeping from us, Book?” She asked wearily, knowing that whatever chances they had before of escaping this were about to become vastly more complicated. 

Booker’s face had gone white as a sheet, and he was faintly trembling, scratching ineffectually at his bonds. “No, no, no,” he begged. “Not now, it can’t happen now—fuck, we need to get out of here—“

Joe laughed, harsh and ugly, and he turned to scoff at Booker. “You want to get out of here now? You couldn’t have realised that before you put us in this mess, before they sliced piece after piece out of my Nicky and violated his privacy in the most appalling ways—“ and then it finally hit him, the sharp scent of an omega in deep distress, and behind that, a cloying sweetness. “Sébastien?” He asked, so shocked that he used Booker’s full name, and the Frenchman winced, and turned his head to look at Joe, eyes wide and pleading. “I’m sorry Joe,” he said. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, they told me they would just take a few samples from you guys while you were unconscious and then let you go, I never thought they would keep you here like this. I know you won’t trust me anymore, but please, you have to help me get out of here, I don’t know what they’ll do if they find out—“

“Find out what?” Nicky asked, confused and looking skeptical at Booker’s earnest protests that he had somehow been so naive as to imagine that Merrick’s people would content themselves with a few vials of blood and then send them all on their merry way.

Booker was starting to look too terrified to put together a coherent answer, and so Joe took pity on him, eyes locking with Nicky. “He’s going into heat, my love. Pretty soon, I think, you’ll be able to smell it too if you calm down a bit.”

Nicky wouldn’t have believed it if anyone but Joe had told him that, but he knew Joe wouldn’t lie to him, yet... “How?” He asked. “They didn’t have any kind of decent suppressants until the 1940s, how did we never know you were an omega in all these years? How is it possible that we never saw you go into heat before?”

Booker looked sufficiently miserable that Andy immediately knew the answer. “In cases of great grief, our sex characteristics can be suppressed sometimes. As in cases of starvation and great physical strain, like when we first found him in Russia,” she explained, and Booker shuddered, clearly barely holding himself together, but he felt that he owed them an explanation. 

“We weren’t traveling together those first decades after I died, when you all let me go back to my family for the years they had left. My heats sort of slowed down after my wife passed away, and...” he swallowed deeply. “And after my youngest son died, they stopped all together. By the time I met up with you again, I wasn’t having a heat cycle at all anymore and my scent had become so faint that I’m not surprised you couldn’t tell. I wasn’t trying to hide it, really, it was just the last thing I wanted to talk about. I thought you all knew but just let it go because you knew how painful it was for me. Thinking about being an omega just—it always makes me think about my boys,” he said brokenly, and the naked grief in his voice put the first tiny crack in Nicky’s fury. For the first time, he realised that Booker had given birth to his own sons, had carried them in the very body that later betrayed him by healing while his sons’ bodies could not, and he could understand how that could break a man.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have long to reflect on it, because that damned doctor Kozak came back in, and she immediately sniffed the air with satisfaction. “Aha, I thought that last injection would do it,” she said, and Andy practically snarled at her. “How dare you manipulate someone’s biology like that,” she spat. “What kind of sorry excuse are you for a scientist, anyway?”

“One who’s probably going to confirm that the child of two immortal parents is also immortal,” the doctor said easily, rummaging around in a storage cabinet, and Booker’s face blanched even further, if that was possible. “What do you mean—you can’t—you don’t have—“

She pulled out a few vials and some equipment, and Nicky shut his eyes, knowing where this was headed. “Oh but I do,” she replied easily. “Got several good samples from your feisty friends before you arrived,” and Booker looked to Nicky hoping it wasn’t true, but the resigned way the Italian man looked back told him all he needed to know. It hit Joe a moment later, and he twisted in his bonds, managing to get one wrist free in his desperation. “You can’t do that,” he insisted. “You can’t—how dare you use that, that’s Nicky’s and mine—“ he was close to getting the second wrist free, but the doctor stepped in quickly, injecting him in the neck with enough tranquilliser that he fell back, out to the world. “Don’t make me sedate you too,” she warned Booker, who was squirming in his own bonds, eyes hunted. “Really, you should be grateful, you could bear a whole new line of soldiers, men and women who will shape the future of the world.”

“Please,” Booker begged her. “I’ll do anything else you ask, just please don’t ask me to bear another child who will grow up and hate me, please, I can’t do it,” and she sighed. “So ungrateful,” she said, and he would be thankful later that he couldn’t remember the next few moments very clearly. She gave him some kind of shot that relaxed him, he knew, and propped his hips up, and then there was cold plastic inside him, every part of this so horrible and different from the love with which he had conceived his sons, and then there was a soft voice, like that of an angel, telling him that everything would be alright, and distantly he realised that it was Joe who had woken up and was trying to comfort him, and that broke his heart still further because he had hurt his friend so badly, had forced him to watch his soulmate being dissected under his eyes, and despite that Joe was still trying to ease Booker’s pain.  _I should have told them how much I was struggling_ , Booker thought to himself.  _Maybe they could have helped me, in some way that didn’t end up here, with this horror_ ...and then, blessedly, he didn’t think anything at all for a few moments.

By the time he came to, Nile had already shown up and the room was plunged into chaos. Nile had gotten Nicky and Joe free first, and they were raining down a hail of vengeance. Nicky was going after the doctors while Joe destroyed the samples, smashing vial after vial, and Booker sighed, thinking that it was too late for the one that was inside him. Nile was working on Andy’s bonds and fussing over her stomach wound, applying a quick dressing, and then she turned her gaze to Booker, indecision flickering over her face. “I’m really really pissed at you, idiot,” she remarked, and then her face softened. “But also, they told me what happened, so. I’m also really sorry. Can you fight?”

He blinked, watching behind her shoulder as Nicky fought with both his sword and Joe’s, skewering the doctor on one while he smashed a file cabinet with the other. “You’re not just going to leave me here?” She shook her head vehemently. “No man left behind,” she declared. “And if you can fight, so much the better.”

He could still fight—in fact, fighting was easier than thinking about what had happened in the lab. Fighting was pure instinct and adrenaline, and it felt like a blink of an eye before they were downstairs, looking at a very crumpled car and a very crumpled Nile who was slowly putting herself back together.

They washed the blood and gore off at their closest safe house and then trooped silently to the pub to debrief and talk about how to forget the horrors of Merrick’s lab, and Booker left at one point so that they could talk about his betrayal, clutching the glass of seltzer water that Andy had pressed into his hand with a “just in case”, and went down to stroll by the river, kicking up pebbles.

Andy came down after a little while to join him, and every slight wince of hers just shot a stab of guilt through him. “So, are they going to cast me out?” He asked. “Or worse—well, I don’t know what would be worse when you can’t die.” He swallowed deeply, having something that he had determined to insist on. “I’ll take whatever punishment they decide,” he said adamantly. “I shouldn’t get special treatment because you know I’m an omega now, and probably I’m not even fertile at this point, so there’s no way to know if what they did in the lab worked—“

“Booker,” she said, slowly and gently, pressing a hand to his shoulder. “You don’t smell like you’re going into heat anymore,” and she didn’t need to elaborate because he crumpled, sinking into her arms and burying his hitching breaths in her shoulder. He didn’t need her to tell him what that meant; the only thing that would have stopped his heat in its tracks was a successful insemination. 

“It’s going to be okay, Book,” she told him, rubbing his back a little awkwardly. “We’ll be here to help you. And Nicky and Joe are still understandably angry that you got them captured, but, well. It’s one of their children too, they’re not going to leave you alone to deal with that.”

“I deserve to be alone,” he muttered darkly. “How could I have been so stupid to do something unforgivable like that, putting all of you in danger?” She pressed a kiss to his hair, trying to sooth him as waves of distress floated through the air. He might not smell like an omega in heat anymore, but all of his other pheromones were back and firing on all cylinders after more than a century of dormancy. “Our lives are very long, Book, and you’re not the only one to do something that seems unforgivable at the time. Joe might not have done anything terrible, because he has a heart of gold, but Nicky wasn’t exactly on the right side of history when he and Joe first met. You think he didn’t have times when he wondered how Joe could ever look past that and see something to love? Goodness knows I’ve done plenty of things over the years that turn my stomach now. You will learn to live with this, I promise you. And so will they—just give them time to learn to trust you again.” She pressed a hand to the place where she knew minuscule cells must be dividing, the first hint of new life. “The little one will help them heal, I think. We’ll just have to take it step by step, Book, together as a family.”


	2. Chapter 2

The first few months after Merrick—the first few months of Booker’s pregnancy—were simultaneously better and worse than he had expected. He wasn’t alone, as he had feared—he was allowed to trail after the team from safe house to safe house. 

They didn’t let him do fieldwork, which they chalked up to his condition, but he knew was also partly because they didn’t trust him, and he didn’t blame them, honestly. The stakes were higher than ever given Andy’s newfound mortality, and he had made it crystal clear that he couldn’t be relied upon. Still, they allowed him to help build their cover identities, set up cameras to keep an eye on them, and that was more than he might have hoped for, and besides it distracted him from how miserable he felt.

He wasn’t sure if he just hadn’t remembered how much the first trimester sucked because it had been so long since he had been pregnant, or if this time around it especially sucked because instead of his loving wife as his alpha, he had two men that his body recognised as the fathers of his child, but which (for good reason) despised him. Like Andy had predicted, Nicky and Joe didn’t demand that he leave, and they weren’t really openly ugly to him, they just sort of left him alone. Booker had tried talking to them once, and Nicky had gritted his teeth and said, “Sébastien, I’m not ready to talk to you without saying something that I wouldn’t want the baby to hear,” and after that Booker didn’t try and approach them anymore.

In any case, Booker felt absolutely wretched inside and out, as if his body itself was punishing him for what he had done to his family. He woke up every day like clockwork feeling nauseous, and the feeling wasn’t confined to the morning either. He could barely keep any food down all day, and to make matters worse he was exhausted no matter how much he slept. 

Andy tried to help him as much as she could, but she wasn’t naturally suited to being soothing. She would get frustrated that she couldn’t just take care of his malaise like she could take care of an intruder, and finally Booker would get fed up with her increasingly ludicrous suggestions of how to help him and would give her a tight hug and lie to her telling her that he was going to be okay.

Nile was his one consolation in those early weeks; always cheerful and always attuned to his moods, she would be able to tell when nobody else could that he wasn’t feeling well. She would try little things to help, from slipping him an extra pillow on the couch to plying him with exotic tea blends and leaving little things in his room—no omega actually needed that many trinkets and soft blankets to nest, he wanted to tell her, but instead he just smiled fondly every time he would see another little pile of fluff and knickknacks on his bed. More than once, he found himself wondering if he would have given into Merrick after all if Nile had joined the team just a few months earlier. He didn’t feel quite so alone, with her around—but it still wasn’t the same as having a partner (or two, his traitorous mind supplied) holding him at night, and he felt the loss acutely. 

Nile was one of the things that staved off the crushing loneliness he had felt for two hundred years, and the other was the baby. He felt a little silly doing it, but when he was sitting in his room alone he would put a hand on his barely-there bump and tell the child everything. What he did that day, how tired he felt, what he had managed to eat, how sorry he was that he had already messed up their life by getting their fathers captured and sparking this new uncomfortable tension in the group, how he would try to fix it somehow before they arrived. He told them, always a little wetly, how much he wished they had been able to meet their brothers. He told them little stories about their family, half-remembered jokes from Andy or delicious dishes that Joe had cooked a century ago, and above all he told them how much he loved them already. 

It was true, too—Booker had always adored children and no matter the horrific circumstances of this one’s conception and how terrified he was that the child would grow up to hate him like his sons had, he loved the baby already with a ferocity that surprised him. It didn’t help that he could imagine a child with Nicky’s eyes or Joe’s curls, and he took special care to tell the baby all the good things about Nicky and Joe, all the things which he should have remembered before meeting with Copley.

But he still felt wretched, and the baby unfortunately couldn’t rub his back when he was puking his guts out. Nile had tried to come help him the first few times, but it just happened so often that finally she had learned to leave him alone and offer him a hug and some tea once she was sure he was finished. 

It was about three months into his pregnancy, and Booker was wondering when this would ever end as he paid his respects to the porcelain gods yet again, when he heard the door slam from the room next to him, which in this particular safe house was the room Nicky and Joe slept in. Having them next door was a particular kind of torture, because sometimes he would catch a whiff of their scent or hear them making love at night, and his body would clench around nothing, confused as to why he was growing with their child and yet curled up in his cold bed, listening to them through a locked door.

But this particular morning, the positioning of his room and tiny bathroom meant that he could hear Nicky’s curses as he slammed the door shut, Nicky’s footsteps as he stomped down the couple of steps to the kitchen and started opening and shutting cupboards. His stomach thoroughly emptied for the moment, Booker crawled back into bed, his hand on top of his best approximation of where the baby was, and indulged in a soft rant to his child. “One of your fathers seems particularly upset this morning,” he told the little one. Since he had no way of knowing whether it was Joe or Nicky’s sample that had gotten him pregnant, he had settled for referring to both of them as the baby’s father. “I’m sure it’s annoying to have to hear me upchucking constantly, but it’s not like I can really do anything about it,” he reasoned with the little bean inside him. “I don’t blame you, either, chéri,” he reassured the baby. “I know you’re not trying to make me feel sick, it’s just part of making sure you can grow strong and healthy.” 

He sighed softly and tried to fall back asleep, which wasn’t easy given the racket that Nicky was making in the kitchen. He had no idea what Nicky was doing so furiously, but he certainly wasn’t going to go ask, and so he just cuddled up to one of the soft blankets that Nile had gotten him and tried to relax. 

He had almost drifted off when, to his astonishment, the door opened and Nicky walked in, looking uncharacteristically hesitant. “I made you a soup,” he offered, carefully setting down the bowl on Booker’s nightstand, fussing with the placement a bit to avoid looking at Booker. “I, uh. I looked up what’s good to help with, you know, you feeling so sick,” and Booker’s cheeks flushed at the thought of Nicky trying to find something to help him. 

“Oh,” he said softly, sniffing the soup. “It smells really good, Nicky, thank you,” he murmured and offered Nicky a bright smile, and Nicky smiled back, cautiously, before his face turned serious again. “Sébastien, I’m still very angry at you,” he confessed. “Joe still has nightmares about what happened in the lab and every time he wakes up screaming, I feel another wave of anger that you put him through that. But our baby—“ and Booker felt light-headed at him calling it that—“our baby didn’t have any part of that, didn’t do anything wrong. So if you’re feeling sick, or need something for the baby, I want you to come to me, alright?” 

Booker nodded, picking at the comforter a bit and trying not to scent the air too obviously, but it was hard when Nicky was right there, smelling like home and family. “You—I mean, we don’t even know if it’s your baby or Joe’s...” Nicky cut off that train of thought quickly. “Doesn’t matter,” he said easily. “Any child of Joe’s is a child of mine and vice versa. We come as a package deal, him and I,” and Booker sighed. That had always been part of the problem, hadn’t it? It was always the two of them against the world, and their love didn’t leave much space for anyone or anything else. 

“Well, thanks for the soup,” Booker said, and Nicky didn’t appear to notice how he had turned melancholic again, how he curled in on himself a bit and pulled the blanket closer, a poor substitute for the comfort of someone’s arms around him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know if there’s anything in particular you would like to see in this story and I’ll see if I can work it in!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Definitely not the last of the problems and misunderstandings between the boys, or the end of Booker’s angst, but he and Joe make a little progress.

Fortunately, Booker hadn’t expected everything to change after Nicky brought him the soup, because that one gesture certainly didn’t erase all of the bad feelings and awkwardness between him and Nicky, but it did mark the beginning of a subtle shift. Whereas before Nicky had nearly completely ignored him, now Booker felt like Nicky’s eyes were always tracking him,observing every wince and unsteady step, and if the Italian man still didn’t have much to say to Booker, he would swoop in to pull out a chair for Booker or offer him a cup of tea.

Nile had been trying the same kind of things for weeks, but when she did it it just made Booker feel fond affection for his newest team member, while when Nicky made an effort to take care of him, Booker flushed with heat and felt a deep contentment purring inside his chest. He knew intellectually that Nicky was only worried about the baby, didn’t want his or Joe’s child to be affected by Booker’s evident stress and unhappiness, but when Nicky tucked a blanket a little closer around him while they were all watching something on TV or woke Booker up with one of his favourite breakfasts, he could almost kid himself that it was because Nicky cared about him, that Nicky had finally seen the gaping hole inside Booker that for decades had craved love and affection and understanding.

“Your father—Nicky, I mean,” Booker told the baby one night, “made me crepes this morning. I ate far too many of them,” he admitted with a laugh, “but I haven’t had them in a long time and now that you’ve stopped making me feel nauseous, you’re making me ravenous all the time! Such a good baby, you know that I lost some weight over the last few months and now you’re trying to make me hungry so that you and I can both be healthy.” He sighed softly. “They may not like me very much, but your fathers will love you, I’m sure of it,” Booker reassured the child. “All the little things that Nicky tries to do for me now, it’s not really for me, it’s because he cares about you already. He cares about you so much, in fact, that he’s willing to put up with me in order to make sure you’re safe, and I appreciate that. Joe...well, it’s more complicated with your father Joe. He and I got along so well, before. I always admired Nicky and found him charming, but Joe and I got on like a house on fire from the very beginning.” 

He sighed, curling his hand around the little swell of his stomach. “Nicky’s angry with me, but Joe’s hurt, and that’s harder to get past, somehow. Anger burns hot and fast yet fades easily, but hurt can linger for a lifetime. And our lifetimes are long, mon chou,” he added ruefully. “But no matter what, no matter how they feel about me, they’ll be good fathers for you,” he insisted, and then he swallowed deeply and whispered the fear he had been clutching close to his chest. “I just hope they won’t take you away from me, because you’re all I have, my little one,” and when hot tears prickled at the back of his eyes, he let them fall, burying his face in the pillow so that no one could hear.

He lay there for a while, trying to get his emotions back under control—which was getting increasingly difficult as the months of his pregnancy went by, much to his chagrin—when all of a sudden he heard a soft knocking on the door. At first it was so hesitant that he thought he was just hearing things, and then the knocking came a little more insistently, and then he heard “Book? Can I come in?” and his heart clenched a bit at the sound of Joe’s voice.

“Of course,” he replied, sitting up in bed and trying to make himself a tiny bit more presentable. He didn’t remember nesting very much when he was carrying his sons, but then again he always had his wife to hold in bed back then, and their cottage had been small besides, so there hadn’t been much room to make a big pile of soft things. Now, though, he had a huge room for just himself, and he had all the things Nile had been collecting for him, and without hardly thinking about it he had started to accumulate a cozy little nest. 

He was strangely embarrassed for Joe to see it, but Joe just gave a little half-smile at the piled up blankets, mementos and baby toys, and perched on the very end of the bed. “How do you feel, Booker?” He asked, and Booker blinked a bit. This was fast becoming the longest conversation he had had with Joe since Merrick’s lab, and he wanted to be careful not to misstep. “I feel better these days, not quite as tired and sick,” he answered honestly, his hand going automatically to rest over his stomach, and that made Joe’s face soften a little more. 

“Good,” Joe said, and then he bit his lip, considering. “I wanted to talk to you about something. About the baby, I mean—“ and Booker thought that he could feel his heart dropping into his gut. He knew it, this was when Joe was going to tell him that he and Nicky had talked about it and decided that Booker clearly wasn’t a fit parent and that it would be better if they took the baby away with them. “I know you might not have thought of this because we don’t usually need to go to the doctor for anything, but I thought it might be a good idea to have an appointment or two, just to make sure the baby is growing strong and healthy—“ he broke off, suddenly noticing how worked up Booker was, how the air between them was acrid with the scent of his distress. 

“What’s wrong, Booker?” He asked, a little alarmed, and the omega rubbed roughly at his eyes. He wasn’t going to cry in front of Joe, he was determined not to. “I thought,” he answered, voice a little shaky, “that you were going to tell me you want to take the baby away from me after they’re born. Because I’m a bad father, and to punish me.” There, he thought to himself, now it’s out there.

Joe’s eyes widened, and he shook his head so quickly that his curls bounced in a way that Booker would find cute if he wasn’t so stressed. “Book...” he said a little sadly. “How long have you been worrying about this?” The way the Frenchman looked away would have been answer enough, the way that he picked up one of the small stuffed toys that Nile had already bought for the baby, a little plush whale, and turned it back and forth in his hands. “I mean, I don’t have the greatest track record,” he blurted out. “My s-sons ended up hating me, after all, and I almost killed Andy—“

Joe sighed. “First of all, I want to get one thing completely straight. You can’t blame yourself for either your sons’ mortality or Andy’s. We don’t know why we have this—well, I would call it a gift, but you would probably call it a curse,” Joe added ruefully. “But I’m very confident that you couldn’t have done anything to give your sons immortality, or to keep Andy from losing hers. I have plenty of issues with you right now, Booker, and I’m trying to work through them because I want us to get back to the way we were before, I’m just not fully sure how to yet. But whatever I think about you, I am confident that you loved your sons very much and that you tried your utmost to be a good parent to them. And I’m sure that you will try your best to be a good father for this little one, as well.” Something struck him, suddenly. “You don’t want to keep the baby away from Nicky and I, do you?” 

Booker shook his head adamantly, a little shocked. “No, never—you’ve never even had children before, have you? I would never take away that chance from you, not if you want to be a part of the baby’s life. However long that life is,” he added. It had been something else that had been bothering him, of course, and he wasn’t sure which option bothered him more. On one hand, he hoped desperately that Kozak was right about the biological child of two immortals being immortal as well, because he didn’t know how he could stand to learn to love another child only to lose them in a few decades; on the other, he felt terrible to condemn a child to the same endless limbo that he had so struggled with.

Joe reached out a hand at that, and Booker could see by the surprise in his eyes a moment later that he had done it without really thinking, but Booker still reached out and took his hand and squeezed, briefly. “We can’t change how long they have with us, Booker,” Joe said softly. “All we can do is try and make their life good while they’re here, whether that’s 80 years or 800,” and Booker nodded, sighing and tangling his fingers in the fur of the little plush whale. “I know, I just...I never thought I would be pregnant again,” he admitted. “It’s hard, remembering how much I enjoyed it when I was pregnant with my sons, how close I felt to them when they would move around, how excited I was when I started showing. It’s so hard to feel that again and to remember how it ended with them, how I promised myself I would never go through that again.”

“I can only imagine,” Joe said, in that kind way of his that always made Booker’s heart melt. “I wish you had told us, you know, that you were an omega. Just so that we understood a little better what you were going through. I wish you would have talked to us about all the things that were bothering you. I don’t know that we could have helped, and we certainly couldn’t have fixed them all, but we could have tried.” 

Booker gave a little half-shrug. He wasn’t sure that they could do much, honestly.They couldn’t bring his wife and sons back. They couldn’t find him a way to bring back his mortality, and he wasn’t sure that they could find a way to make him content with the eternity that stretched in front of him. Maybe...but he pushed the thought away as soon as it appeared, the brief shining glimpse of a possibility where Joe and Nicky had enough love to share not only for the baby but for him as well, of centuries with a family that would know how to fill the empty spaces inside his heart.

“I’ll go to the doctor if you want me to,” he said finally because he didn’t know what else to say, and Joe brightened a bit. “Thank you, Booker. I don’t like doctor’s offices much either, especially after...well, you know.” Yes, Booker thought, he knew all too well. “No, you’re right,” Booker agreed, looking down at the slight swell of his belly and feeling his lips curl up despite himself. “For you, mon cher, I would do anything,” and from the look in Joe’s eyes that was at least one thing they could agree on.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some sweetness, some spiciness, a little sadness and some bonding time with Andy and Nile, as someone requested a chapter or so ago, to finish :)

Nicky picked out the doctor after weeks of scrupulous research, squinting at the computer he still wasn’t fully comfortable using, but it was Joe that went with Booker to the appointment. Nicky would undoubtedly have gone too if they had let three people come to the appointment; instead, he waited nervously in the car, giving Booker a long searching look right before he and Joe went into the clinic, as if warning him not to try anything funny. The lack of trust still stung, even though Booker freely admitted that he deserved it, and really, how could he complain when he had Joe accompanying him to the appointment and Nicky waiting for them outside? He knew that he owed the fact that they were speaking to him at all to the baby—his child’s first gift to him. 

In Merrick’s lab, his sudden heat had seemed like the worst possible nightmare, but where would he be without it? Alone and cut off from his family, probably, staying out all night and stumbling home to a dingy flat. Instead, he might not have his family’s forgiveness, but he had Nicky cooking him increasingly creative breakfasts and he had the charcoal drawing of Paris in 1838 that Joe had hung up in his room, above the antique crib that Nile had found online. 

The doctor’s visit was...a peculiar experience. Booker could count on one hand the number of times he’d been to the doctor—he hadn’t usually been able to afford it, during his mortal life, and then afterwards he healed so quickly that he never needed one. It hadn’t been usual at all, when he had his sons, that he had given birth to them at home, in the cozy cottage outside of Marseille that he and his wife’s father had built together. Geneviève had found a sort of midwife for him, an old woman without much formal training but who had helped half the omegas in the town give birth, and that had been good enough. 

Better than good enough, he thought as he and Joe sat in the waiting room, both of them trying not to squirm at the uncomfortable memories which the clinical setting dredged up. Booker liked that his sons had been born into the same waiting hands that had caught their cousins and their playmates; he liked that one of their first sights were the walls of the home that their father and grandfather had built, rather than the soulless fluorescent lighting and drab curtains he saw as they waited for the doctor to come in.

Booker liked the doctor, but he bristled a bit at some of her questions, not used to sharing much of himself with a stranger. “Is this the alpha father?” She asked with a glance over at Joe, and Booker was willing to explain the situation as much as he could and admit that he wasn’t sure who the alpha father was, but Joe didn’t miss a beat, he just nodded and shot Booker a tiny wink. It shot an unexpected flash of heat through Booker, the ease with which Joe accepted the baby as his, and then he thought about Nicky waiting outside and guilt settled deep in his gut. Being a front-row spectator to their love-for-the-ages had always been a mixed bag, equal parts inspiring and agonising. It would have been hard not to feel lonely watching them— even if he hadn’t had a puppy crush on Joe for more than a century, even if he wasn’t charmed by the little flush on Nicky’s cheeks when Joe would tease him.

He had to fudge some of the answers, of course—he couldn’t tell her that he had last had a full heat in 1841, or that he had carried three sons to term and one of them had lived long enough to have children of his own, grandchildren that Booker had never been allowed to meet. 

Finally, she seemed satisfied, and told him it was time for the ultrasound. Booker felt his own heart pounding as she searched for the baby’s—in all his years of life, this was new to him, this possibility of seeing and hearing his child before they were even born—and then he heard the soft whoosh of his son or daughter and he stopped breathing for a moment, swallowing deeply to try and chase away the lump in his throat. I have made so many mistakes, he thought to himself, but I have also made three amazing sons and now this new miracle.

“Oh,” Joe said over the soft sound of the baby’s heartbeat, as if his world had started spinning the other direction, and Booker knew just how he felt. They listened and looked almost in a daze as the technician pointed out an arm here, a leg here, and then she smiled gently at them and asked if they wanted to know the baby’s biological sex. “I think so,” Booker replied, somehow not having given it much thought, the fact that in these days you could know that before the birth. A little panicked, he looked at Joe, eyes questioning, and even though he knew that the technician would no doubt be confused, asked “Do you want—I mean, do you think Nicky would want—we should have asked him,” he fretted, and Joe turned to face him, still with the same smile with which he had been looking at the baby. “I already talked to him about it, he says whatever we want is fine,” he explained. “I must admit I’m curious, if you are,” and Booker nodded, a little firmer. 

“Congratulations, it’s a girl,” she told them, and Booker felt his chest tightening up. A girl, he thought, struggling to wrap his mind around it. He realised in that moment that somehow he had just assumed, after three sons, that he would have a fourth boy. A girl, he repeated to himself, a little giddy. His only daughter, a precious gift to come to him now, when he needed her the most.

Somehow, Booker hadn’t expected that Nicky would be quite as taken with the ultrasound pictures as he was. Andy and Nile oohed and aahed over them satisfactorily—well, Nile oohed and aahed, Andy just looked once and nodded, satisfied, and muttered “Good, I’ll teach her how to ride horses”—and Joe smiled fondly every time he glanced at them, and Booker felt a similar glow whenever he thought of the way his little girl had stretched out her arm in one of the pictures, as if to greet him. But Nicky would hardly let anyone else look at the snapshots, poring over every detail of them and calling a very patient Joe over to exclaim over his latest discovery. “See here, cuore, how delicate her fingers are!” he might exclaim, his own fingers tracing the image. 

Booker thought that he shouldn’t have been so surprised. Nicky and Joe had lived for almost a millennium without ever having children, he realised. Joe had had a wife when he was about eighteen, but she had been carried off in a wave of sickness not long after they were married, before he had ever had the chance to become a father. As a couple made up of of two alphas, this was something that Nicky and Joe had likely never expected to have no matter how long they lived, and Booker was glad that, given all the pain he had inflicted on them, he could also give them this. 

If he hadn’t expected how captivated Nicky would be by the pictures, he certainly hadn’t expected the other effect that seeing the evidence that the baby was growing strong and healthy would have on Nicky. Booker noticed that he was a bit handsy all night, while they were eating dinner and watching football reruns since it was Joe’s night to pick the channel, but things escalated quickly once they retired to bed.

Booker had honestly intended to go straight to sleep, tired after the emotional drain of the day, but as he was stripping off his clothes and setting the ultrasound pictures carefully on his dresser, he caught a whiff of scent that made him once again realise why he simultaneously loved and hated having the room next to Nicky and Joe in this safe house. 

“Joe, amore mio,” he heard Nicky calling on the other side of the thin wall, “fuck, the idea of you as a father gets me hot,” and Booker couldn’t really blame him, he felt flushed himself imagining Joe patiently teaching their daughter to read, or lifting her onto his shoulders so that she could see better, or studiously braiding her hair. Booker heard a decided thunk against the wall, then, and knew that it was going to be a long night. Or, well, a very short and intense night if the desperate moans Nicky was letting slip were any indication. 

Joe murmured something that Booker couldn’t catch, and Nicky whined, another wave of desire wafting into Booker’s room, and it was all he could do not to groan out loud. He curled up in bed, turning the light off and kidding himself for a moment that he could ignore it and fall asleep like he usually did when he overheard them. “Can’t wait that long,” Nicky said impatiently. “Please, Joe, just fuck my thighs or something,” and Booker had to chew hard on his lip to stifle a moan at the mental image he was conjuring up. 

Between his mental picture and the noises he heard—pants unzipping, wet kisses and then more slick sounds, before finally Joe let out a low moan that told Booker he had slid home between Nicky’s thighs, Booker was left squirming uncomfortably, trying to ignore how his cock was already fattening and how he knew that if he reached down between his legs, he would be wet and ready. It didn’t help that he had been almost perpetually horny since he started his second trimester; he remembered practically exhausting his wife with his libido while he was pregnant with his sons, and it seemed that time hadn’t changed much in that regard. 

If a stiff breeze could turn him on these days, how was he supposed to resist when it was Joe and Nicky right next door, Nicky mewling helplessly as Joe took him against the wall, wave after wave of their combined scent drifting between the rooms until Booker was heady with the scent of their lust? He warred with himself, guilt momentarily restraining his desire, and then finally gave in, figuring that they should have found somewhere more private if they didn’t want him to hear and smell them. He trailed his fingers down the slope of his belly, dipping into the waistband of his pants, slowly stroked his cock a few times before sliding his fingers down to where he really wanted them, biting down hard on his lip as he felt how slick he was already. It felt so good he nearly cried when he sank two fingers in, and then from next door he heard Joe’s murmurs of praise, telling Nicky how good he felt, how wonderful a father he would be, and Booker felt as if his brain might short out. He worked his fingers faster, heedless at first to the fact that he had started pumping out his own strong pheromones of desire not unlike an omega in heat, a sweet scent of desperation, but he could tell the moment that Joe and Nicky noticed. Joe groaned, loudly; Nicky gasped and then they were furiously whispering. Much of it was too quiet for Booker to hear, but he caught snatches—“smells so good”, “carrying our child,” and they fell into a delirious feedback loop, Booker and the couple on the other side of the wall. He stopped trying quite so hard to stifle his moans—his scent made it useless to try and hide what he was doing, anyway—and the first time he let a loud groan slip, his fingers stuttering inside himself, he was rewarded by another gasp from Nicky, another burst of desire in the air. Nicky smelled like woodsmoke and cinnamon; Joe was sweeter somehow, all burnt caramel and the first apples of the autumn, and Booker was as drunk from it as he had ever been from the bottle.

Nicky fell over the edge first, and if he was nearly silent, Booker could taste his ecstasy on the air, and it was enough to push him over as well, and as he lay there panting, he savoured every moan of Joe’s that filtered through the wall, knowing that for once he would sleep soundly. 

They were gone in the morning. Andy had found the note, written in Nicky’s cramped handwriting, when she stumbled into the kitchen to make coffee, and she was the one who broke the news to Booker, voice careful and kind in a way that he hated, because it meant that she had seen through him. He had to be more careful when Nicky and Joe returned, he told himself. If the night before had been enough to send them running, he could only imagine how far they would run if they caught a glimpse of the feelings he had carefully suppressed for years.

“They needed some time off to relax,” she explained, and he just nodded mutely. “They went to their house in Malta, so we know where to find them if we need them, and Nicky said in the note that it you need anything with the baby, anything at all, just to call.” Booker nodded again, not sure what to say. Time to relax. Time away from him, they meant; time away from the baby that was clearly dredging up inconvenient feelings. Time to settle back into the world they had inhabited for nearly a thousand years, a world with only two poles and their love as the axis.

Andy might not be the best at comforting, but she had a damn good handle on loneliness, and she was good at coming up with distractions. She dragged him into town to buy groceries, luring him in with the absurd excuse that the shopkeepers always gave him a discount because they were particularly fond of him, and then pulled him into the only pub they had managed to find that made a mocktail good enough that Booker didn’t mind the lack of alcohol and between the two of them they tried every flavour of virgin mojito on the menu. By the time they had finished ranking them, classing pineapple as the best and blueberry as the worst, Andy’s phone buzzed with a message from Nile. “She says we need to buy popcorn because she wants to have a movie night,” Andy read, and frowned a bit, wrinkling her nose. “I’ve never understood these New World people’s obsession with corn, it’s crunchy and tasteless. Now chocolate, however, that was a good idea,” she mused, and offered Booker her arm as they went off to find Nile’s precious microwaveable packages.

Booker knew that the women must really be feeling sorry for him, because they suggested that he pick the movie, and when he asked if they could watch a French movie, they both acquiesced way too easily. Normally Nile hated anything with subtitles, because it meant she actually had to pay attention the whole time instead of also playing ridiculous games with Joe on her phone, and Andy spoke perfect French but liked to pretend she didn’t, for some reason. She had made Booker think for a good thirty years that she didn’t speak a word of French just for fun, biding her time for the first time he grumbled something about her in his native tongue, and then she winked and said, in impeccable French, “I can understand everything you say, you know.” 

Booker had wanted to show them L’Empereur de Paris for a while, not because it was a tremendous film though it was well done enough, but because it felt so much like home that it hurt. He had seen it in a tiny cinema in Paris when it first came out, and if he could tell that they had taken some liberties with Vidocq’s life to make the film more sensational, the recreation of Paris in the early years of the 1800s was so familiar it was uncanny. He was surprised how much it affected him, really—to see scenes of the Arc de Triomphe still under construction, covered in scaffolding; to see the final scene with the rows and rows of soldiers wearing uniforms that he knew so well, to see the Tuileries Palace again, whole and unburnt. You could live forever, he thought, but you never forgot your first life, those early years when you thought your days were still finite.

“I knew him, you know,” he remarked partly through the film, snatching some of the popcorn out of Nile’s lap and snuggling up more under the blanket they were all sharing, Andy’s arm loose across his shoulders. “Vidocq, I mean.” He chuckled lightly. “We had a lot in common, you know—he was only five years younger than I was, and we were both deserters from the army and petty criminals who lived long enough to make a little something of ourselves. I even worked for him for a few months while he was running his secret police, until I got so badly injured in a fight that I had to disappear or they would have noticed how fast I was healing. But Vidocq had a good run, for a  bagnard —he lived long enough to see the empire fall and rise again, and long enough to become something of a hero rather than a villain. And now everyone knows him as Jean Valjean,” he added, with a sidelong grin at Nile, and she nearly jumped in the air. “What?! Really?” Booker chuckled. “I knew that would get you going. Yes, he was one of Victor Hugo’s inspirations. There were characters based on Vidocq in almost every book back then, he was wildly popular. Everyone likes a good reformed rogue.”

“I like him fine,” Nile said, considering, “but I like those antique pistols he has even better. Those are super sexy, goddamn. Can you teach me how to use one of those?” she asked, eager as a little kid, and Booker smiled wide enough that for a moment he could forget Nicky and Joe’s absence, content to be with his sisters and his little daughter in his belly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved L’Empereur de Paris for the film’s period decor and thought that it would bring back a ton of memories for Booker!! Vidocq’s life was absolutely wild (he really was apparently a major inspiration for Les Mis), too—he needs more love outside of France so I was happy to include him here :)


	5. Chapter 5

Nicky and Joe were gone almost three weeks, which gave Booker time to teach Nile how to use antique duelling pistols, letting her shoot at a target in the backyard while he watched proudly and thought, someday I will have this with my daughter. 

It gave him time to talk to Andy about something he had been thinking a lot about, turning over in his mind. “I want to name the baby after you,” he told her one morning when they were having coffee together out in the garden, Nile still sound asleep. 

She blinked, a little taken aback, and while she was still processing she blurted out “won’t Nicky and Joe want to weigh in on the baby’s name?” He shrugged, offering her a half-smile. “Guess they should be here, then,” and she couldn’t argue much with that. “Give them time,” she encouraged him, looking off into the distance. “I’m really touched, Book, honestly, but...names are special,” she explained. “Look at me—I’ve lost everything over all these years; lost my family and my people, lost even the memories of my early years. But the one thing I’ve carried through all these centuries is my name. If you wanted to give her my name as her middle name, I would be incredibly honoured. But she deserves her own name as well, something that’s just hers.” Booker hadn’t thought of it that way, but he understood what she meant, and he hugged her tightly. “Thank you,” he whispered into her ear.

By the time Nicky and Joe came back, Booker had settled on Juliette for the baby’s first name, a choice that the other men seemed pleased enough with, and it was nearly Christmas. Nile was so excited about the holiday season that was infectious for the rest of the team. Joe and Andy weren’t Christian, Nicky had a complicated relationship with his faith to say the least, and religion had never been a big part of Booker’s life, but for Nile’s sake they all got thoroughly into the spirit of the holidays, decking the house out with an increasingly absurd amount of decor.

Joe and Nicky were jovial and friendly, more so than they had been since Merrick, and that made up for the fact that they all conveniently pretended as if that night after his doctor’s appointment hadn’t happened, as if the three of them had never felt what it was like to let their desire spur them on to dizzying heights.

Booker had never put much effort into gifts before, but he wanted to do something special for his family that year, to thank them for sticking by his side despite everything, and maybe he also wanted to give Nicky and Joe the smallest indication of how much he cared about them.

The look on Nicky’s face when he unwrapped the new leather scabbard which Booker had made for his longsword was worth all the hours that he had spent painstakingly smoothing the leather and embossing images on it—an eclectic assortment of scenes that featured in Booker’s most cherished memories. Their house in Malta, with its huge balcony overlooking the sea; the Christmas market in Germany which they went to every year until they became too sad that the shopkeepers they had gotten used to wereno longer there; the medieval streets of Leuven where Nicky had done his second doctorate while Andy and Booker ran a printmaking shop and Joe painted.

“I love it, Sébastien,” Nicky said, turning it over again and again, and Booker felt the heat rush to his cheeks at the surge of pleasure he felt from doing something that made Nicky happy.

Joe was even more emotional, if that was possible, when he opened his own gift. “How did you possibly find it?” He asked in awe, his fingers brushing worshipfully over the edge of the canvas. “I still have some contacts in the art and antiquities trade from that one job,” Booker said with a little shrug, as if he hadn’t called in a dozen favours and spent hours hacking into systems to try and trace down this particular painting. It was one of Joe’s own works, one of his favourites. It was of a sunset along the Tunisian coast, with the silhouettes of palm trees and of a man that an outsider might never recognise, but Booker knew right away was Nicky. Joe had carried it from safe house to safe house for more than a decade after he painted it, but they eventually had to abandon a German cottage in a hurry and when they returned a few years later, the house had been burgled in their absence and the painting had gone missing.

While Joe was still proudly examining the painting, Nicky handed Booker a carefully wrapped package, smiling a bit sheepishly. Booker’s fingers trembled slightly as he opened it up, curious about what they might have gotten him. His heart sank as he opened the box and found that it was nothing personal—nothing for him at all, really, just tiny soft sweaters and plush toys. Things for the baby. He should have known, he thought.

Booker looked at the pile of tiny clothes and fuzzy toys, swallowing deeply, and then he carefully wrapped them back up in the shiny paper and met Nicky’s confused gaze. He knew he should be grateful that they were trying so hard with the baby, but he just felt exhausted, cored out. 

“I can’t anymore,” he said softly, and he thought that Andy looked proud as he stood up, one hand cradling his belly. “I know that I can’t expect any more, and that I don’t deserve any more. I know that I’m lucky that you want to be around me at all after what I did, and that I should just be pleased that my daughter will clearly have fathers who love her.” He gestured at the pile of baby things they had given him. “But I can’t anymore. These aren’t gifts for me, they’re for the baby, and that’s fine—that’s fine,” he repeated, scrubbing at his eyes as he felt himself getting emotional. “I’m not just Juliette’s father,” he tried to explain. “I’m not just a vessel to grow your child, I’m not just a forger to set up your fake passports, I’m not just—“ he paused for a moment, knowing that he shouldn’t be airing this particular bit in front of the others, but he couldn’t help but get it all out—“I’m not just an omega whose scent you can get off to like a perfumed candle. I’m a man with a heart that bleeds and feels, and I’m scared, and I have been so lonely for so long that I can’t stand it anymore. For more than a hundred years, you have been by my side but you have never seen me, never really looked beyond the surface, never saw how much I needed you, how much I needed someone to realise that I was not okay, how badly I needed to be loved and to love in return. Do you know that, around the dawn of the 20th century, I spent thirty nine years without being hugged once? I counted the years, you know. I traveled alongside you through most of them, sat at the table with you, but you were so caught up in your own world, you never thought to reach out and pull me into your arms. Finally, do you know what I did? I went to a brothel and paid a girl for a night and then all I did was that I curled up in her arms and cried, it felt so good to touch someone again.” 

He picked up the baby things, clutching them to his chest like a shield. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that you already love the baby. She deserves the world, andI want her to have all the love she can possibly get. It’s, just, well. It’s a little hard when I have craved your love for so long and known I could never have it, not the way I want it.” He sighed, shrugging on his leather jacket. “I’ll be at my apartment in Paris, I need some time alone. Merry Christmas,” he added, and he was out the door before Nicky and Joe could get over their shock. 

They let him have his space, even though he got daily texts from Nile checking in on him and one short message from Nicky that just read “Joe misses you very much”, and Booker sighed at that one. Joe probably missed feeling the baby’s little kicks, more likely, he thought. 

He moped around for seven days, the familiar sights and smells of his favourite city only barely managing to drag him out of his misery, and on New Year’s Day, when he came back from getting groceries there was a woman in his kitchen in a long red coat, helping herself to a glass of water. He knew immediately who she was, had shared her torment every night for more than 200 years. “Hello, Booker,” Quynh greeted him. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, things are going to start looking up now—the boys have been doing a lot of hard thinking in those seven days!


	6. Chapter 6

Three things happened at once. Booker dropped the groceries and fumbled for his gun, terror hitting him at the thought of someone in his house, someone who might be unhinged enough after centuries of drowning over and over again to hurt him and his child. With the bag of groceries out of the way, Quynh got a better look at the swell of his belly and scented the air in surprise, realising what she had failed to see in her dreams. And meanwhile, back at their house in Tuscany, Nile woke from her afternoon nap with a gasp.

“Booker,” she gasped out, running to go find the others. If she had had any doubt that the boys cared about Booker just as much as he did about them but had been too blind to realise and admit it, they were immediately quashed by how absolutely gutted Joe looked, how Nicky furiously paced back and forth while Andy was trying to get them the fastest plane to Paris. 

Joe’s fingers were white as they gripped Nicky’s in the car on the way to the airport, and he kept asking Nile, over and over again, to describe what she had seen in her dream. She understood his panic and was touched by it, but she was starting to get exasperated with not having any more details to give him. “I told you it was just a glimpse, Joe—I saw her in his kitchen, and they were talking.” “Did he look hurt?” Joe asked, desperate, and Nile told him for the thousandth time that he didn’t look hurt, no, though he looked tired and Quynh didn’t exactly look well rested either.

“She’s been missing for so long,” Andy said softly. She hadn’t said much since Nile told them, undoubtedly wrestling with her own hope and fear at the thought of seeing Quynh again. “But I don’t think she would hurt him. Especially not in his condition.”

“She had better not,” Nicky said, a little bit dangerously, and Joe squeezed his hand again, looking down sorrowfully at his lap. “How could we have been so foolish, amore mio?” he asked, and Nicky sighed. “I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure about my feelings and you didn’t want us to approach him until we were sure we had completely forgiven him, but that seems so short-sighted now...what if he gets hurt and he doesn’t know that we want him to be a part of our family, too, not just the baby?” Nile shook her head from the front seat, turning back to give them a look. “For two smart guys, you two can be pretty damn stupid sometimes, you know? But it’ll be okay, you can tell him what you need to when we get there.”

While Nicky and Joe imagined the worst, Booker and Quynh were sitting in his little kitchen, talking. There had been the tense stand-off, admittedly, when he pulled his gun out and she set the glass of water down. “I’m not here to hurt you or the baby,” she told him, then shrugged, figuring that honesty was the best policy. “Well, I was going to rough you up a bit until you told me where Andromache is, but that was before I knew that you were pregnant.”

She sat down primly at his kitchen table, taking another sip of water. “We can’t really do my other plan either, which was to get drunk together until you confessed why you and Nicky and Joe are still pining after each other, so I guess you’re just going to have to tell me what I need to know without liquid courage.” She raised an eyebrow. “First, you can tell me why you’re pregnant with Yusuf’s baby, and then we’ll work up to why you look like such a kicked puppy all the time in my dreams.”

Booker’s eyes widened, but he cautiously put away the gun and sat down across from her. “What do you mean, Joe’s baby?” He asked. “I got pregnant in a medical lab—long story, my fuck-up—and we don’t know whether it’s Nicky’s or Joe’s.” She laughed, sniffing the air again. “It’s definitely Joe’s,” she confirmed. “I’m surprised the others can’t tell, but probably they are around both Nicky and Joe so much that they can’t tell their scents apart anymore, but you smell so much like Joe that it’s uncanny.”

“Oh,” Booker said softly, cradling his bump. Just like he hadn’t cared about the baby’s gender, he hadn’t really had a preference for if it was Nicky or Joe’s baby biologically—but somehow, knowing those things made the child seem more real. A daughter with Joe’s smile, Booker thought, a clear picture forming in his mind. How lucky he was.

“Well,” he began, “it’s not a very pretty story. It all started when I was pressed into the Grande Armée....” It was oddly freeing, telling her everything, while she listened, seemingly impassive. The long brutal military campaign, how he died for the first time—and the second and third and more times than he could count—at the end of a rope in a frozen field in Russia, how the others came for him but he chose not to go with them right away but to return to his wife, how much he adored his sons and had the happiest moments of his life raising them, how eventually he couldn’t hide the fact that his hair never turned grey and he never sported wrinkles, how his sons’ love and admiration slowly turned to hatred and resentment and how it broke him. He told her about the long years of loneliness, about how at first he thought he just wanted what Nicky and Joe had—and then realised that in fact he just wanted Nicky and Joe, period. He told her about how tired he had been, how he had been an easy target for Copley to approach with his proposition. He told her about the agony of the lab, a horrific experience which had nevertheless brought him his daughter.He told her about the past few months, how Joe and Nicky were going to be such good fathers but how he felt like he was kept on the sidelines, and she just listened and nodded.

Finally, when he finished, she sighed. “That’s a pretty shitty life,” she acknowledged. “Not as bad as hundreds of years of drowning, admittedly, but not good. I think that the baby will help you,” she commented, and that drew a smile from him, the quiet joy that came over him every time he thought about his daughter. 

He eyed her, assessing. “I didn’t know what to expect, if you ever managed to get out of the water. It was horrible, the glimpses of what you went through. And yet you’re more...” he bit his lip, not sure how to say it delicately. “More stable?” She asked with a grin. “It was more awful than you could possibly imagine,” she admitted, her eyes dark with the memories. “But somehow it’s easier to put it behind me than I might have expected. It’s like once the lock on that thing finally rusted and I managed to escape, I could imagine that it was all just a long nightmare.” 

She shrugged off her coat, finally relaxing in his presence. “Plus there’s another thing.” She tugged up the sleeve of her sweater and showed him a small bruise. “I’m not healing anymore,” she explained calmly. “It must have stopped almost as soon as I got onto dry land.” There was an apology in his eyes, but she brushed it away. “It’s okay, really. I saw in my dreams that Andy isn’t healing either, so this is good, really.” She offered him a shy smile. “I may only have one life to live now, but that makes me determined to live it well, and if I am allowed to grow old with the woman I have loved for more than a thousand years, then that will make me very happy indeed. Speaking of which, where is Andromache? It was easier to find you, I only saw nondescript flashes of a garden from the new girl.”

“They’re all at our house in Tuscany,” Booker explained. “It’s a nice peaceful place, and we had decided that I would have the baby there and that we would stay there until Juliette was a few months old at least. We still haven’t worked out how we’ll go on missions after she’s born, but for now we’re on a sort of break.” He shrugged. “I’ll take you there, if you want. I stormed out a little embarrassingly at Christmas—“ “You had your reasons,” Quynh interjected. “But I want to go back soon anyway, I don’t want to deprive Nicky and Joe of this time while I’m pregnant.” He sighed and kissed his hand, then lay it on his bump. “I hope for her sake that we can build a better relationship, one that works for all of us, whatever that may look like.”

He was about to suggest that they could go for a walk and he could show her around the neighbourhood when there was a sharp rap on the door, and then Nile’s voice, loud and urgent. “Open up or I’m going to break down the door.” A little alarmed, Booker got up so quickly that he felt a little lightheaded, and Quynh lay a steadying hand on his arm. “Do you want me to go open the door?” She asked, but he shook his head, starting to get an inkling of what might be happening. If Nile had fallen asleep and caught onto the fact that he and Quynh were alone together, with nobody sure what Quynh would be like after her ordeal, he could only imagine how panicked they might be. “I think it’s better if I go first,” he muttered and called out “I’m coming, don’t do anything stupid like break down the door.” 

He made his way over to open up, and saw Nile first, gun drawn and face determined, but immediately behind her were the others. Nicky and Joe both looked sick with worry, and Andy was more nervous than he had ever seen her. “Everything is fine,” he reassured them quickly, gesturing to Nile to put the gun away and motioning for them to come into the hallway. “The baby is fine,” he told Nicky and Joe, alarmed to see Joe’s eyes filling with tears. “She’s fine, I promise, she’s kicking away at all the excitement,” and he took their hands to lay them on his belly so that they could feel for themselves. “See, she’s alright, she’s happy to see you again,” he insisted, and Nicky looked up at him very seriously. “And are you fine as well, tesoro?” He asked, and Booker’s breath caught in his throat. “I’m better now that you’re here,” he admitted, and there was so much that he wanted to say that he didn’t know where to start. He had been afraid that everything would be awkward after Christmas, but instead they were looking at him with the care that he had only ever dreamed of, and Nicky took his hand away from the curve of Booker’s belly to entangle their fingers. “We have all made mistakes, sometimes big ones,” Nicky said carefully. “But today is the first day of a new year, yes? I think it is a good day for us to start with a fresh slate. We forgive you for everything and we hope that you will forgive us for not noticing how much you needed us. So, a new beginning for our little family, what do you say? We have many things to talk about, about how that family will take shape, but it will be built on the love we have for both you and Juliette, so we know that it will be good.” 

Booker sort of crumpled, and went into Nicky’s arms, burying his face in the other man’s shoulders as Joe rubbed his back. He heard soft voices in the kitchen and knew that Andy must be savouring her reunion with Quynh, but he couldn’t care about anything beyond the little bubble of the three of them and Juliette. “Oh,” he thought, remembering that there was something important that he had to tell them, and he turned in Nicky’s arms to face Joe, letting Nicky still hold him from behind. “Quynh could tell—she said that she could tell from my scent, she was pretty adamant about it—“ he looked at Joe, swallowing deeply. “It’s your baby,” he told him. Joe’s breath caught and he sank to one knee to press a kiss to the curve of Booker’s belly, murmuring something that Booker thought might be a prayer. If there was anything to pray about, Booker thought, it was this—this child that seemed like a miracle, the hope of a new year filled with love and forgiveness, his family at his side. When Joe stood up again, there was determination in his eyes, and he cupped Booker’s chin with one hand. “Sébastien,” he said very seriously. “Can I kiss you?”

“Yes, now and whenever you like,” Booker replied easily, and then he had Joe’s lips on his, chaste and sweet, and Nicky’s hand in his, and he thought that this was heaven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bright new year for all of them, indeed!!
> 
> Not sure where this is headed next, happy to take into consideration any things you all want to see :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little interlude that came to me :) please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see in this story!

They were all too emotionally exhausted to make their way back to Tuscany right away, and even if Booker missed their big house and the little nest he had made for the baby, he was never in a rush to leave his beloved Paris. There was only one problem—his cozy apartment which he had kept since the late 1800s was rather too small for a coterie of immortal warriors. He looked mournfully at the sofa for a moment, trying to think if there was any possible way that they could all fit, and Andy took pity on him with a laugh. “I think we can manage to find a hotel for a few nights,” she suggested. None of them wanted to go back to the half-destroyed house at Goussainville after what had happened there, of course.

“Let me introduce you to a wonderful thing called Airbnb,” Nile said with a twinkle in her eye, already pulling out her phone. “You’re going to like this, Quynh—see, you just mark what dates you want here, and then I can specify that I want a whole apartment not just a room in somebody’s place—“ Quynh watched avidly, her fingers entangled with Andy’s as she watched Nile’s phone, and Booker smiled to see the two women already getting along so well.

Once he had packed them off to their new apartment, Booker settled onto the sofa sandwiched between Nicky and Joe, allowing himself to take a quiet breath of relief and hope. They were here, for both him and the baby, and there was a tiny spark growing in his chest, the hope that he might be able to keep it that way.

Part of him wanted to talk to them about what their future would look like, how they saw him fitting in alongside them, how they pictured things once the baby arrived, and another part of him wanted to kiss Joe again and again and learn what Nicky tasted like as well, but he was emotionally and physically exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping well ever since he had left on Christmas, the combination of his angst and the baby’s energetic kicking keeping him up at night, and he had no sooner sat down that he dozed off, his head dropping down to rest on Joe’s shoulder. “Sleep now,” Nicky whispered, looking over at them fondly. “We will take better care of you from now on, Sébastien.”

Either Joe or Nicky or both must have carried him to bed at some point, he realised, because he woke up with Nicky coiled around his back and Joe’s hand resting lightly on his bump, and he smiled, stretching lazily. They had agreed to meet up with the women at one of Booker’s favourite cafes and he had plans to take them around the city, but those plans were derailed as soon as they walked into the cafe and saw a very excited Quynh. Somehow she had found out that two female alphas could get legally married, now, and she was determined to make an honest woman out of Andy as soon as possible.

Nile tried to talk her into waiting a few weeks, at least—long enough to go dress shopping and organise a little party—but Quynh was adamant. “If you had waited as long as I have, you would not want to wait even a week,” she remarked softly, and nobody could argue with that. She only had to wait a few hours, long enough that Booker could draw up some credible French passports for one Quynh Tran and Andromaque de Beauvoir, who had apparently been living together at his address for more than five years (When Nile asked about Andy’s choice of last name, the older woman just shrugged and said “I liked Simone, and besides, I’m planning on taking my wife’s name in a few hours, so it doesn’t matter much.”)

Nile disappeared for a few hours while Booker was putting the final touches on the passports and entering an appointment into the town hall’s calendar that definitely hadn’t been there a few minutes before, and came back with a shopping bag looking far too proud of herself. “Alright, I got you some important things,” she announced, and handed Andy something long and thin. Andy peered at the offending article, face scrunched up in confusion. “What do I do with it?” She asked, bemused, and Nile chuckled, smoothing it out. “You wear it, silly, it’s a sash.” Carefully she slipped the garish neon pink “Bride to Be” sash over Andy’s head, adjusting it until she was satisfied. “That’s what bachelorettes wear, and you’re about to finish a stint as the longest bachelorette in history, so.” She reached back into the bag and pulled out a little plastic tiara for Quynh, all blinged out with rhinestones. “I couldn’t find a veil, sorry, but this should look nice on you.” Quynh nodded solemnly, placing it on her head with as much care as if it had been made of gold and diamonds, and even Booker had to admit that she looked rather regal afterwards. “And I got you a little bouquet,” Nile finished, pulling out a carefully wrapped bundle of white and red flowers. “Thank you, Nile,” Quynh said softly and kissed Nile on the cheek, much to the other woman’s surprise. “It’s no big deal,” she replied, suddenly sheepish. “Just thought I would make it a little more fun.”

And so it was that Andy and Quynh were married on the day after New Year’s, at the town hall of the 4th arrondissement in Paris in sight of the 800-year-old cathedral that they had watched being built. Andy wore a black shirt, leather pants and a garish pink sash; Quynh wore her red coat, a flimsy plastic tiara and carefully clutched the bouquet Nile had gotten her. 

Nicky and Joe served as their two witnesses, smiling fondly as they thought about the hundreds of times over the centuries that they had promised to love each other as many times as death parted them and brought them back together, and the first time that it had been in a town hall just like this, the first time that it had held legal weight. Nile and Booker (and little baby Juliette, who was kicking up a storm during the proceedings) were the only guests at the ten-minute ceremony, and when the two women signed the register and kissed, Nile whooped so loudly that the mayor’s assistant nearly jumped out of her skin. She insisted that they get one photo to mark the occasion, promising Andy in a whispered aside that she wouldn’t let it fall in the wrong hands, and the mayor’s assistant snapped a shot of their little peculiar family. Nile was off to one side, beaming, Andy was pressing a kiss to Quynh’s hair, and Joe had one arm slung over Nicky’s shoulder and one over Booker’s, his fingers a brand on Booker’s arm.

They went to a cafe afterwards, all of them pressed together under the heaters on the terrace, and got sloshed on champagne—well, except Booker, but he felt drunk on happiness watching his family laughing and teasing each other, savouring the feeling of Nicky’s thigh against his and Joe’s fingers entwined with his, and the strong smell of home that came from their mingled scents. “Alright,” Andy said finally, draining her glass. “Nile, fair warning, I’m about to go back to the apartment and have a truly tremendous amount of sex with my wife. I honestly don’t mind if you’re there when I do, but I thought I’d better give you a heads’ up in case you want to crash on Booker’s couch.” Nile chuckled, nudging Andy’s arm. “Don’t worry, boss. I already booked a ticket on the night train back to Italy, I’ve got a few things I want to take care of down there before you all join.” She clinked her glass against Andy’s and Quynh’s empty ones. “Congratulations, you two. Can’t think of two lovelier brides than you,” and it was a sign of what a remarkable day it was—and, probably, how much champagne she had had—that Andy’s cheeks reddened a bit. 

Nile went off to get her train, Andy and Quynh left hand in hand to go celebrate their marriage, and that left Booker and Nicky and Joe, alone together while awake for nearly the first moments since Joe and Nicky’s panicked rush to Paris. “Let’s go home?” Nicky suggested softly. “And we can talk about how we want our family to look so that we can work on it between now and the time the baby is born.” Booker nodded, letting Joe help him out of his chair. Things were getting unwieldy with the bump that seemed to grow by the day, but he never minded it, not when it meant that his daughter was on her way. He was a little nervous of the talk he knew they needed to have, of trying to actually vocalise what he wanted and hoping that they would want the same, but the soft look Nicky gave him made him think that it would be alright, somehow. “Let’s go home,” he agreed.


	8. Chapter 8

When they got back, Booker busied himself for as long as he could making coffee, until Nicky couldn’t stand it anymore and lay a hand on his shoulder. “Booker, it will be alright. It’s just us, after all, just us sharing what we are hoping for,” and Booker nodded, sitting on the sofa and gulping his coffee so quickly that his tongue was grateful for his rapid healing.

“I don’t—I don’t know where to start,” he admitted. He turned to Nicky in particular. “You—you said, the other night—“ he remembered, the words having played over and over again in his head since then—“you said that you love both Juliette and I. Can you tell me how?”

Nicky nodded, considering his words carefully. “Joe and I came at you from opposite sides, sort of,” he explained. “I realised—oh, a long time ago—that I was attracted to you, but your grief and your immortality both complicated things. If you had been a mortal, Joe and I would have undoubtedly pulled you into our bed for a night, like we would do with strangers every decade or two.” Nicky shrugged. “But it seemed like a bad idea to have a one-night stand with someone you were going to have to work alongside and see for all eternity, and besides, we had no idea if you would be receptive.”

Nicky looked over at Joe with so much love in his eyes that it almost hurt Booker to see—though a little less, now, than it always had before. “I thought you were attractive, but it was Joe who slowly started to develop feelings for you, and, well, that was something new and unexpectedly challenging for us.” Booker swallowed deeply, rolling their words over in his head. “You had feelings for me, Joe?” He asked softly, carefully. “Since when?”

“I don’t know,” Joe answered honestly. “It didn’t happen all at once, is the thing. You and I always got along well, from the very beginning when you joined us. Even when you were still raw with grief and not sure about the rest of the team, you and I always got along. I always felt something for you, Book, that’s the thing. At first, when we found you in such a sorry state in Russia, it was compassion. Later, as I got to know you under the layers of grief and insecurity, it was friendship, fondness, eventually brotherhood. And then one day, I looked over at you and I knew that it had become something that I needed to talk to Nicky about.”

“And did you?” Booker asked quietly, his mind whirling at the revelation that they had talked about this, thought about him in this way. He never would have imagined, all those nights that he lay alone, hearing them murmuring softly to each other on the other side of the door. “Did you talk to him?”

Joe nodded, running his fingers through Nicky’s hair just to earn his nose scrunching up adorably. “Of course I did. It was too important not to, you see. At first he didn’t understand what I was trying to tell him, he thought that I was trying to invite you into our bed. Which I guess I was, at some level, but not only that. He kept telling me that he had thought about it too, and explaining to me all the reasons why he had decided it was a risky idea. It was not easy for me to explain, you see, because though we had had countless dalliances with attractive people over the years, neither one of us had ever developed feelings for someone else before.”

“Ever?” Booker asked softly, a warmth growing in his chest at the soft way Joe looked at him. Not at his baby bump, but at Booker’s face, directly into his eyes. “Ever,” Joe confirmed. “Not since I met Nicky, anyway. I didn’t really know what to do with it, honestly. Thankfully, my Nicolo was nothing but supportive once he finally understood what I was trying to say, and he never judged me, never made me feel like I had done something wrong.”

“You had not,” Nicky said, firmly. “But you see, Booker, this is why I was so terribly angry with you, at first. Not simply because you got Joe hurt, but because you hurt him here,” and when he placed a hand over his own heart, Booker could already feel the tell-take prickling at the back of his eyes. “And as you know very well, Sébastien, we have no special healing for our hearts.”

“I’m so sorry,” Booker managed to get out before he fell into Joe’s arms, sobbing against his shoulder as Nicky rubbed his back and Joe murmured over and over to him “it’s okay, we’re okay.” “It really is alright,” Nicky added. “We told you the other day that everything is forgiven, and we meant it. I just wanted you to understand that Joe truly loves you.”

They held Booker until his tears slowed, and then held him a little longer, until finally he sat up, and Nicky got up to offer him a moist washcloth to wipe his face. “Sorry about that,” Booker said a little sheepishly. “I feel like I’m especially emotional these days—I know it’s normal with the baby, but it drives me crazy.” Nicky threaded their fingers together, nodding with that serious look he wore so often. “It’s normal to be emotional also when you are talking about such important things,” he reassured Booker. “We don’t have to talk any more about it tonight if you don’t want,” but Booker shook his head quickly. He wanted to have a better sense of where they were heading, what their future would look like.

“Why didn’t you ever talk to me?” he asked and Nicky sighed softly. “I think now that perhaps we should have,” he admitted. “But, well. First, there was the fact that we didn’t think you would be interested. It was obvious how much you still loved your wife, and you had never shown any interest in men whatsoever, and we assumed when we shouldn’t have. But then, there was also me.” He grimaced a bit, afraid that Booker would take the next bit the wrong way. “I didn’t feel the same way about you as Joe did. It felt as if I should, because I had all the pieces already. You were part of our family, I cared about you, and I found you undeniably attractive. But I knew that I did not love you, not the way that Joe did. Joe told me I should not be surprised, because after all it took me many years to love him the way that I do now. I do not know why, what it is about me—there is probably some name for it now, with this new openness and understanding of the wide range of sexualities people have, but I was always this way. When I was young, before I went off to the Holy Land, my brothers were always falling in love, deep infatuations with a woman they had spotted in church and barely spoken to, or the young wife of one of their friends, but I never did. I did not fall in love with my male friends either,” he explained, answering the silent question in Booker’s eyes. “I found them attractive, somehow, but I simply did not know what it was to love, and even after I met Joe, even after our anger faded to quiet companionship and then to the genuine joy we took in each other’s company, even after I felt passion for him I was not sure it was love. I never lied to him, I always told him how I felt. There were a good few years, a few decades even I think, where he was endlessly patient with me. We would lie wrapped up in each other and kiss and my heart would thrill to hear him say that he loved me, but I would need to find other words to tell him how I felt about him.”

“Those were good years, too, Nicolo,” Joe told him, nuzzling Nicky’s cheek. “I told you a thousand times that if you never felt just as I did I would not mind. It was a joy to share your life, to make you laugh, to taste your smile. And you always told me how much you cared for me. You would tell me that seeing me first thing in the morning cheered you; you would tell me how much you hated the moments that we were apart; you would whisper that you cherished every part of me.”

“All of it was true,” Nicky said softly, leaning in to kiss Joe, his hand still holding Booker’s. “And then one day I just knew that I loved you, profoundly and forever, and I’ve never doubted it since.” He pulled away a little regretfully, squeezing Booker’s hand. “But I wasn’t there with you yet, Booker, fond as I was of you, and I couldn’t promise when and if I would be. I told Joe over and over again that I would be happy to share his love with you, that I did not mind if he wanted to seek you out, but in the end we decided together that it wasn’t fair to approach you and risk turning our friendship and camaraderie on its head for something that was...less than what you deserved. We were worried that you would always feel apart from us, like it was Joe and Nicky and then we had added you on the side, and we didn’t know how to fix that.”

Booker sat there for a moment, weighing over everything they had said, and finally he nodded. “Emotionally, I wish you had told me there was a chance that I could have anything at all with you,” he said. “It would have been nice, to know that someone was still alive who loved me. But intellectually, I know that you’re right. I think I would have always felt second-best, especially back then when I was so fragile.” He rubbed at his eyes, trying to think of how to say what he needed to say.“I don’t want you to ever be less than honest with me, Nicky, or feel bad in any possible way for what you feel or don’t feel. Your love for Joe is a beautiful thing to watch, and I’ve always felt privileged to witness it, even though yes, it has made me jealous at times.”

He took a deep breath. “I understand now, I think, where we stand, and how we came to this point. Where are we going?” He asked, the million-dollar question. “We can’t go back to how things were; if nothing else, the baby changes that.”

“She does,” Nicky said softly. “But it’s not just that. I was so worried, Booker, when Nile told us that Quynh was here with you and we did not know how she would be, after so long in the water. I know that kind of worry, deep in my bones, because I feel it every time Joe falls and I wait for him to get back up again. I felt that kind of worry for you—not just for Juliette, for you—and I felt the same aching relief when I saw you unharmed, and I think that if I let that feeling grow it could be love.”

Booker nodded, taking it in without really processing for the moment, and then he turned to Joe. “And you, Joe? What do you want? I would understand,” he told him roughly, because it had to be said. “I would understand if you don’t feel the same way, after what I did.”

“I don’t think you could do anything that would stop me from loving you,” Joe replied, easily, and reached out to take Booker’s other hand. “I was very angry with you, and hurt, and I cannot promise that I will never be angry or hurt again, but I do think I can promise that I will not stop loving you, just as nothing in the world could stop me from loving my Nicky.”

Booker’s breath caught. It wasn’t Joe’s most romantic speech of all time, the pure poetry that he had heard him spout about Nicky, but it was honey in Booker’s ears, a balm on long-open wounds. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I need to think for a minute.”

“Take as long as you need, we are here,” Nicky said solemnly, and that sparked something like decision in Booker. 

“That’s what I want, if it’s alright with you,” Booker told them. “I want you, both of you. But I want the time to build this the way it deserves to be built. We have hundreds of years stretching ahead of us, most likely,” he explained. “And I don’t want to wait hundreds of years. I don’t even know if I want to wait a year. But I want to—“ he sighed, frustrated at how hard it was to describe what he wanted. “I want to build our family brick by brick, because I want it to last for a very long time. I want to date you, at least until the baby comes,” he told them for lack of a better word, “so that someday I have the hope of being your equal partner. That means that I want to spend time with the two of you and with each of you alone, and that some nights I would love to curl up in your bed between you or invite you to mine, but that I also think we should keep our own spaces here at the beginning. I want to learn to believe that you love me and not just the baby, Joe, and I want to kiss you good morning, Nicky, and I want to hear you tell me how you feel about me in whatever words are honest. I want to remember what it’s like to have someone, and learn what it’s like to have two someones. I don’t want to jump in between you, and I don’t want to just squeeze in beside you. I want to see if we can grow all together, so that there’s a space for me, like I know you are already building a space for Juliette in your hearts. I want—I want to take the time now for us, because when the baby is here everything will be different and she will be our priority, as she should be. I want to have the time now to ask all our questions, because someday I want to have no more doubts.”

They were silent for a moment, Booker’s heart thudding in his chest, and then Nicky squeezed his hand tightly. “I did not know you were such a poet, my love,” Joe remarked, sounding a little in awe, and Booker only had time to swallow past the lump in his throat before Nicky’s lips were on his for the first time, soft and sweet, and then Nicky whispered “yes, to all of that,” and Booker let them pull him into their arms and for the first time in a long while let himself believe that everything would be alright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was really tricky because I really wanted to capture how complicated love and attraction are and how unimaginably complicated they would be in this scenario with two people who’ve been together for almost a millennium and then someone else catches their eye (and heart).
> 
> I also feel like there’s somehow nothing more romantic than wanting to take the time to build a really strong relationship!


	9. Chapter 9

Booker woke up the next morning hopelessly entangled with Joe and Nicky, his leg slotted neatly between Nicky’s as Joe clung to his back. He would have been happy to stay there, revelling in the feeling of holding them and being held by them, except that he had to pee urgently, as he did most mornings at this stage of his pregnancy. He tried his best to extricate himself from their embrace without waking them up, heart clenching at the little plaintive noise a still-sleeping Joe made as he pulled away, but when he came back from the bathroom Nicky was awake, a little half-smile on his face. “Did you sleep well?” He whispered, and Booker was surprised to find that he could answer yes honestly. “Well, I’m not dreaming about drowning anymore, so that’s huge. And I think having you so close helps too,” he reasoned. 

Nicky scooted back a bit, closer to Joe, so that Booker could lay down on his other side without waking Joe up. Booker did so, rolling over so that he was facing Nicky, gazing into those sea foam eyes. “I wanted to tell you,” Nicky said softly. “Thank you for understanding, last night, about how I’m slow to fall in love,” and Booker shook his head firmly. “You don’t need to thank me for that, Nicky. I wouldn’t be very worthy of being loved if I could not understand that.” 

Just then, the baby kicked energetically, and Booker smiled down at his belly. “Our daughter is awake,” he told Nicky, and then he paused, a sudden worry striking him. “Were you disappointed that it’s Joe’s baby?” He asked, and Nicky laughed brightly, as if the very idea was ridiculous. “Sébastien, please. Nothing would make me happier than to have Joe’s little girl to adore.” He laid a hand on Booker’s bump, fingers brushing right over where the little girl had just kicked. “Do you hear that, vita mia? I don’t ever want you thinking you are not just as special to me as if you were biologically mine. Maybe you are even more special, because you are a piece of my Joe,” and Booker felt that now-familiar fluttering in his heart that washed over him every time it was clear what good fathers they would be.

“Nicky,” he said a little roughly, scooting closer so that just his bump separated them, brushing against Nicky’s chest, and he reached over to cup Nicky’s face, breathing in his scent. He let Nicky make the choice to lean in and kiss him, and it was the soft noises of their kissing that woke Joe in the end. He blinked over at them blearily, one of his thousand mega-watt smiles breaking out when he saw what they were doing. “What a beautiful sight to start my morning,” he remarked, propping himself up on one arm so that he could have the best view.

The kiss had been relatively chaste and sweet up until that point, but Nicky redoubled his efforts once he knew that Joe was watching, pressing as close to Booker as he could and tugging at his hair. They were both a little breathless when they pulled apart, and Booker momentarily cursed his determination to take things slow with them.

To distract himself from how he wanted Nicky’s lips back on his, he turned to face Joe, smiling at him. “Good morning, Joe,” he greeted, and Joe’s answering smile was filled with so much fondness that Booker couldn’t understand how he had never noticed it before. “Good morning, Book,” Joe replied sunnily. “And good morning to you too, Juliette. Can’t forget my little princess.” 

Booker felt so full of love in that moment that he knew that it was time to do something he had been putting off. “I have something I want to do today,” he told them softly. “I want to go to the cemetery where my wife is buried, to bring her flowers. You don’t have to come with me, but you would be very welcome to, if you wanted.”

Nicky and Joe had a silent conversation with their eyes, trading glances, and Nicky nodded solemnly. “We would be honoured to accompany you, Booker.” Slowly, they got ready for the day, showering and bundling up for the chill. Their first stop was the florist on Booker’s street, where Joe’s artistic talent came in handy as he and the florist chattered away in French, designing a beautiful bouquet. Then they walked over to the Cimitière Montparnasse, and Booker guided them through the rows of monuments until they found one that was surprisingly well-tended for its age. Booker could read the question in their eyes and he said quietly, “I haven’t been here in years, but I always pay someone to take care of it. I told them that she was my great-great-great-great grandmother,” he said with a little huff of a laugh, and then he bent down, carefully as the baby bump made him more than a little unwieldy, and pressed a tender kiss to the headstone, laying the flowers at its base.

When he started murmuring in Provençal, Nicky and Joe stepped back a bit to give him privacy, and Booker tucked his legs under him, settling as much as he could on the frosty ground. “Hello, Geneviève,” he greeted her. “I’m sorry it’s been a while, my love. I’ve been missing you so badly these past few years, I haven’t been well. Things are better now,” he reassured her, and he could almost hear her chastising him for not getting help for himself when things were bad. “In fact, I have some important things to tell you.” He swallowed deeply. “Two very, very important things to tell you, things that I never thought would happen, but this life is full of surprises. I’m pregnant, my love. With the little girl you always wanted. She’s not even here yet and already I love her so much it hurts. I’m so happy and so scared, Gen. We—there’s reason to think that maybe she will be like me, and it’s a little selfish of me to want that, because I know painfully well it’s not an easy life, but I can’t help but hope, because losing our boys almost broke me. Losing you almost broke me, and I miss you now especially badly. I never expected to do this again, never expected to be pregnant without you at my side, bustling around the house so that I didn’t have to lift a finger.”

He looked over his shoulder at where Joe was standing, his hand in Nicky’s, and he smiled when he turned back to his wife’s grave. “The baby’s father is taking good care of me, though. He’s the one who picked out your beautiful flowers that we brought you, and he’s here with me now, along with his husband. I know,” he added with a little laugh, “it’s a little complicated. But I’m not trying to wreck anybody’s home, don’t worry. I think I might be able to make a new home with them, maybe, with them and our daughter. I’m going to name her Juliette,” he whispered quietly, like it was a secret. “You always liked that name, I know. And her middle name will be Andromache, after one of my closest friends. I miss you so, so much, my darling,” he sighed, fingers trembling a bit as they traced the letters spelling out her name. “I love you today just as much as I did on the day we were married, and that will never change, no matter how many lifetimes I live. I think my heart is growing, though, so that there’s enough of it for you and for Nicky and Joe, so that it can belong to our boys and also to this new little one, my miracle daughter.” He kissed her name, his lips lingering on the cold stone. “I will come back here after she’s born,” he promised. “I will bring her to visit you, and there will be no secrets between Juliette and I. I will tell her all about you, and show her the portrait that Joe did of you from my description. I will tell her what your laugh was like, and how strong and tenacious you were, and what a wonderful mother you were to our boys. I’m going to tell her about them too, so that she knows how lucky she is to have had such men as her brothers.” His voice wavered, but he was able to blink back the tears. “Watch over me, please, my beautiful wife,” he pleaded. “Help me be a good father to Juliette, and help me enjoy this long life I have, these long years before someday, even if it is millennia away, I know I will be reunited with you and with our sons. I must believe that,” he said firmly. “But I must do better at making the most of this time I have, between now and then. I will try harder, so that when that long-away day comes, you will be proud of me.” He patted the headstone one last time. “À bientôt, my darling,” and then Joe came over to help him get up off the ground, and he walked out of the cemetery with one hand in Joe’s and one hand in Nicky’s, and he didn’t look back.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I needed to do that.” Joe rubbed his back, nodding. “I understand,” he replied simply. “Nicky and I have no such place to go remember our families, it has been so long, but we still think of them often, even after so many years.” Just then, Booker’s stomach grumbled loudly, the noise breaking the solemn atmosphere, and the three of them all burst out into laughter. “Clearly it’s lunchtime,” Nicky remarked dryly. “What do you think, should we see if Andy and Quynh can tear themselves away from their sex marathon long enough to tackle some crepes?” Booker nodded, pressing close against Joe’s side as Nicky pulled out his phone to call their sisters, and his heart felt lighter than it had in years, as if he had left a little of his anguish behind in the Cimitière Montparnasse. Thank you, Geneviève, he thought to himself, and then his attention turned back to the new family he was carefully building.


	10. Chapter 10

Andy and Quynh left Paris the next morning, flying to Venice to go on a mini-honeymoon. They agreed to all meet up at the house in Tuscany in a week’s time, which gave Booker a week alone with just Nicky and Joe, feeling around the corners of this new thing between them. Having Nicky and Joe in his bed every night and padding around his apartment was decidedly testing his patience to take things slowly, because sometimes he would be so charmed by Joe’s laugh or Nicky’s little half smile that he wanted to kiss them senseless. His pining for them was familiar territory, but he was surprised with the scale of his desire. Booker’s libido had largely dried up along with his heats after his family had died, but it seemed to be rushing back at full strength, and he knew he wasn’t going to manage to hold out for much longer.

They were good days. Booker had been filled with a quiet calm since he had visited his wife’s grave, and for the first time in so many years he felt as if he was able to look forward to the future with excitement. He still wasn’t sure that he would choose this life, if he could snap his fingers and be a mortal man again, but he had things to look forward to—the overwhelming joy that he felt every time he thought about meeting his daughter, the possibility of becoming someone worthy of Joe’s affections, the hope that maybe someday Nicky might look at him with the same naked fondness that he bestowed on Joe.

Booker shepherded them around the city, taking them for long walks in his favourite parks and ducking into little shops to pick up little things he couldn’t resist for the baby. Joe and Nicky were terrifyingly in sync at swooping in to guide him over to a bench when he started feeling tired or seamlessly taking the shopping bags out of his hands, and he grumbled a bit at their protectiveness but he was secretly touched. 

A few days before they were scheduled to go back to Italy, Booker was rummaging through the fridge, seeing what they had left that they should use up before they closed up the apartment for a while, when Joe cleared his throat, leaning against the door jamb. “I thought maybe you and I could go out for dinner,” he offered, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. “Just us, I mean. As a date,” he clarified, and Booker’s eyes widened as he stood up so quickly he nearly banged his head on the cupboard. “Oh, that would be so nice—but won’t Nicky feel lonely sitting here by himself?” He fretted. “He’s the one who suggested it,” Joe admitted. “He said maybe you and he can go do something later in the week. It doesn’t have to be something fancy,” Joe added. “I just want to spend time with you,” and Booker felt his cheeks heating up at that. “I think I know a place, I’ll call up and see if they have space.”

Nicky knocked on the door while Booker was in the bathroom getting ready, and Booker shouted at him to come in, fussing for the thousandth time with his shirt as he tried to tuck it in in a way that didn’t make his baby bump look absurdly large. “You look nice,” Nicky said softly, eying him from head to toe, and fuck, Booker was going to die of blushing before this night was over. “Thanks, Nico,” he replied, tugging again at the hem of his shirt. “I feel enormous,” he complained, and Nicky shook his head firmly. “You look really good, you’re glowing,” Nicky told him, stepping a little closer. “Here, let me try,” he offered, and adjusted Booker’s shirt so that it fell smoothly over his bump. “There you go, now you’re all set.” 

Booker couldn’t resist it, he reached out to clasp Nicky’s hands between his, looking him in the eyes. “Nicky, are you sure you’re okay with this? I don’t want you to feel lonely tonight, and I know it’s a big step, to have your husband go out with another man—I can’t even imagine what that would feel like,” he admitted, and Nicky gave that little half-smile that Booker loved so much. “Please,” Nicky said very softly. “Let me do this for my husband, who has been waiting many years to share a romantic dinner with you. And let me do this for you, because making you happy makes me happy.” Booker nodded, thinking that he started to understand how Joe had always felt cared for, even before Nicky had fallen in love with him.

“I will take care of him for you,” Booker told Nicky solemnly, a hand pressing to Nicky’s heart in a mirror of how Nicky had held it, only a few days earlier, when he had explained how deeply Booker’s betrayal had cut Joe. “Here too,” Booker added, and he was rewarded by Nicky turning his hand just slightly and pressing a kiss to the inside of his wrist. “I know you will,” he replied easily, and Booker’s breath caught at the show of trust that he knew he didn’t deserve. 

“Go on then,” Nicky told him with a little twinkle in his eyes. “You had better enjoy your night, because I’m going to make Joe tell me everything later,” and he shooed Booker out of the bathroom.

It was a short walk to the restaurant that Booker had reserved, and he spent most of it eyeing up Joe’s pale blue sweater which looked so temptingly soft that he could easily imagine an evening cuddling on the couch with his head pillowed on the soft yarn and Joe’s fingers playing with his hair.

The restaurant was a small simple place, but Booker always felt so at home there—the lights were kept on dim, and there were gorgeous tile decorations on two of the walls. There was a short menu and always one vegetarian option, but everyone in the know came there for the steak frites. Booker smiled as they led him to his favourite table, nestled in the front so that they could talk a little more privately. “Very atmospheric,” Joe complimented, pulling out Booker’s chair to let him sit down, and it was such a small thing but it was nice, to be treated like something special again. Booker had never made a big thing out of being an omega, didn’t want to be treated as if suddenly he couldn’t do anything, but he knew that Joe took care of him not because he didn’t think Booker was capable but because he cared about him, and therein lay the difference.

“I think this is the longest time we’ve ever spent in Paris together,” Booker remarked, knees knocking against Joe’s under the table. “We would spend time at the safe house in Goussainville, sure, but we didn’t come into town that much.” 

Joe shrugged, looking a little sheepish. “Somehow it seemed like your place, I think. We all have those special places that are just ours, to relax. For Andy it’s Vietnam, where she always felt close to Quynh. For Nicky and I, it’s Malta. And I think the rest of us always tried not to intrude on those safe havens. Paris and this apartment was always firmly your domain, and we wanted it to continue to feel like a refuge for you.”

Booker never in a million years would have imagined that that was why they had always seemed to avoid Paris, and his eyes widened. He looked down at his lap for a moment, ashamed. “How did I not see, all these years, all the ways in which you cared for me?” He asked, and Joe sighed, stretching his hand across the table to take Booker’s in his. “We also didn’t try very hard to make sure that you knew what you meant to us,” he admitted. “We didn’t really know what to do with you, because your grief was so fresh, and we had lost our families so long ago that we no longer truly remembered what it was like. Andy understood a little better, because she had lost Quynh not so long ago, but that tripped us up as well, because we thought that what worked for her would work for you too. She liked to be left alone, to come to us when she could stand to be loved, and then to vanish into the ether when it all became too much. But we did not see that you needed the opposite, that you needed us to hold you close instead of let you fly away.”

Booker squeezed Joe’s hand, once. “You’re holding me now,” he noted, and that brought some of the cheer back to Joe’s face. “I am, at that, and I intend to keep on doing it.”

Joe didn’t let go of his hand, not when the waiter came to take their orders, not until their steaks arrived, and even then, he valiantly tried cutting his steak with one hand, which made Booker burst out laughing, which in turn brought such joy to Joe’s face that Booker realised how long it must have been since Joe had seen him laugh full-throatedly like that. “I give you permission to let go of my hand long enough to eat,” Booker said, mock solemnly, and Joe gave a little bow. “Thank you, my heart,” and Booker felt a thrill run down his spine to be called one of the names which he had always thought were just for Nicky. 

He enjoyed the meal more than he had in a long time, eating every bite and even scraping up the remaining sauce with a piece of bread, and was surprised to find that he had room left for dessert as well. Joe had succeeded in drawing two or three more deep laughs from him over the course of the dinner, and brought a new light to Booker’s eyes when he asked him about the antique books that he most coveted.

They shared a sliver of chocolate cake with salted caramel sauce, Joe offering Booker bites from the edge of his fork, and Booker didn’t understand how Nicky didn’t just go around with a huge permanent grin on his face when he got to have this.

Joe took his hand again as they waited for the check, and kept holding it as they walked out into the chill January air. “Do you want to take a little walk?” Booker blurted out, not wanting the magical evening to end, even though he knew that they would be sleeping in the same bed that night. Joe pressed a kiss to Booker’s cheek, his beard scratching pleasantly at his skin, and nodded. Booker took them down to the river and they strolled along the quais, and as many times as he had seen it over the years, the lights flickering in the Seine never failed to thrill him. He paused in front of Notre Dame, seeing the dark shadow of the crane working on rebuilding it after the fire, and he shivered thinking about how painful it had been to watch it burn. 

Joe mistook his trembling for cold, and wrapped his arms around Booker from behind, and, well, he wasn’t going to complain about that either. He settled into Joe’s arms, snuggling back into the blue sweater that was just as soft as he had imagined. “It’s terrifying to have this much hope,” he whispered, a secret between them and the river, and Joe stilled behind him, letting out a long shuddering breath. “I know how you feel,” he admitted. “It seems impossible that I could have this, to have you and Nicky and our daughter.”

“You have me,” Booker replied, and Joe spun him around, hands on Booker’s waist as he pulled him close and kissed him. It was nothing like the kisses they had shared before—it was as if Joe was asking for Booker to give him all of him, as if they were both trying to impress through the kiss how long they had wanted this. 

Booker didn’t know how long they stood there, consumed in each other, his fingers tangling in Joe’s curls as he deepened the kiss, one of Joe’s hands splayed across the swell of his belly, but when they finally broke apart it was because they were both smiling too hard to keep kissing. “I love you, Sébastien,” Joe said, and Booker knew it from the talk they had had the other day, but it wasn’t the same as hearing Joe say it outright, and he had to take a moment to bury his face in Joe’s shoulder, nuzzling the soft fuzz. “I love you too,” he replied once he was sure that he could get the words out. “And Nicky,” he added in the name of honesty, and that brought a grin to Joe’s face. “What do you know, I love Nicky too,” he teased. “It seems like you and I have good taste.”

Booker was elated the whole walk home until right as he saw his apartment building coming into view, and he was struck by a sudden flash of fear. Nicky had said that it was alright with him, but what if he had had second thoughts while they were out? What if they had been gone too long and Nicky had started to worry that Booker had stabbed them in the back again? 

He was lucky that his fears didn’t have to last long, because as soon as he started fumbling with the keys to open the door, unsure if Nicky would still be awake, he heard familiar footsteps on the other side of the door and he was greeted by the sight of a very relaxed Nicky, dressed in one of Joe’s shirts and an old pair of Booker’s sweatpants. Booker dropped Joe’s hand so that he could go to Nicky and receive his soft kiss hello, but even after all the talks they had had, he was surprised when Nicky pulled him in for a chaste kiss as well.

“I want to hear all about it,” Nicky told them, and Booker could tell from his voice that he was sincere, and the vice on his heart loosened. It would take time, he reminded himself, to teach himself that he could have this. “But I’m way too tired to appreciate it now, and I can tell the most important thing from the looks on your faces, which is that you had a nice time, so—cuddles and bed?” he asked, and Booker and Joe let him usher them inside, sharing a shy smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up, some quality Nicky and Booker time :)


	11. Chapter 11

Booker was still full of his quiet joy the next morning when he woke up snugly ensconced in Joe’s arms. He let himself enjoy the warmth for a moment, then carefully extricated himself—for his pressing bathroom needs, as usual these days, but also because he wanted to surprise the other two by rustling up some breakfast. He smiled as he saw how Joe pressed back closer to Nicky once Booker was out of bed, subconsciously seeking the touch behind him that he had lost in front. 

He made some coffee, fried a little bacon and toasted some of the leftover baguette which Nicky had apparently bought the night before, spreading butter and jam thickly on the pieces of toast, and arranged it all on a platter.

By the time he got back to the bedroom, Nicky and Joe were just barely awake, that familiar tenderness in their eyes as they gazed at each other, bodies coiled towards each other. “Good morning,” Booker greeted them, holding out the platter of breakfast like an offering. “Good morning,” Nicky replied easily, and his face was still tender when he turned to Booker. “We’re supposed to be taking care of you, you know, not the other way around,” Joe grumbled goodnaturedly, eyeing Booker’s substantial bump, but he was already reaching for a piece of toast and taking a mug of coffee.

“Thank you, tesoro,” Nicky said as he scooped up most of the bacon and took his own coffee, and Booker flushed. Someday, he thought—maybe someday he would get used to the way his heart skipped a beat when Nicky or Joe would call him the pet names he had always assumed they reserved for each other. Nicky set his plate and cup on the side table, just so that he could reach out a hand to gently grasp Booker’s ankle, pulling him down to sit at the foot of the bed.

They ate in a sort of quiet peace, one of Joe’s hands settling low on Booker’s back as he sipped his coffee. “It’s supposed to be a nice day,” Nicky remarked, scrolling through the weather forecast on his phone. “Do you want to go out with me? There’s a thing that I had wanted to do with you, but it’ll take a little while so we can do it another day if you’re tired today.” Booker shook his head, assessing. “No, I’m okay,” he confirmed. “I’ve been sleeping a lot better, lately.”

“Good,” Nicky murmured, and then he turned to kiss Joe, long and sweet. “You’ll be alright if we leave you alone today, my love?” Joe chuckled, capturing Nicky’s lips again. “Of course. I have some shopping I want to do anyway, and I know that traipsing through department stores isn’t really your favourite.” Nicky scrunched up his nose at the thought of a crowded store, and it was so adorable that Booker couldn’t stifle his giggle. 

“Do I get to know where we’re going?” Booker asked, curious, but Nicky just shook his head. He had always loved surprises, Nicky—Booker couldn’t count the number of times that he had helped Nicky set up a surprise party for Joe or plan a romantic getaway. “No, but you need to dress up warmly.”

That wasn’t a problem—Booker had hated the cold ever since his first death in the snowy wastes of Russia, and he had a wide assortment of hats and scarves, plus a parka that he had put to the test a few years back on a mission to Lapland. He couldn’t fully zip the jacket, not with his bump in the way, but with a sweater layered underneath he was pleasantly toasty as Nicky took him by the hand and dragged him briskly to the Gare de l’Est.

Booker didn’t know what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected to be shuttled onto a suburban train. Other than Goussainville, Booker had never bothered to explore the outskirts of Paris before. It had taken so long, back in the days when he had first moved to the capital with his wife and boys from Marseille, to get out to the villages dotting the countryside, and in the 20th century whenever he was in France, he had only really been interested in revisiting his old haunts, taking a breather in his apartment, walking the familiar streets.

The train was surprisingly nice, Booker thought, relaxing into a plush seat. His back got sore at the tiniest provocation at this point in his pregnancy, and a comfortable chair was a welcome luxury. “It’ll take us about an hour to get there,” Nicky explained. “A bit more, maybe. We can pass the time by you telling me all about your date with Joe,” and then he got a playful look in his eyes. “You can tell me in Italian, if there are salacious details you don’t want anyone else to hear,” he added,and Booker’s cheeks flushed. “Geez, Nicky, we didn’t do anything like  that ,” he insisted adamantly. 

“I hope you made out properly, at least,” Nicky said solemnly, and that wasn’t helping with the flush on Booker’s cheeks. “We did,” he admitted. “When we went walking by the river after dinner.” He paused, suddenly unsure. “That’s okay, right? I don’t want to do anything you’re not okay with—“ Nicky merely shook his head, laying his broad fingers over Booker’s on the train table. “Sébastien, I wouldn’t have suggested that you and Joe go on a date if I wasn’t comfortable with everything that that might entail. Besides—even though I know the circumstances are a bit unusual—you’re already carrying Joe’s child,” and Nicky got that special fondness in his eyes that came over him every time he thought about the baby, “and there’s not really any greater intimacy than that.” He shrugged. “You’re so much younger than we are, so I understand why you worry about these things.” He switched into Italian, not wanting to alarm anyone nearby with the mention of their true age. “I appreciate it, truly, but Joe and I have loved each other for 900 years and I do not doubt that if we live for 900 years more, we will love each other for every one of those trips around the sun. Our love exists....independent of you, I suppose? What I mean is, now we are hoping to make you a part of our little family, and Joe loves you deeply and I hope to love you one day the same, but no matter what happens or does not happen with you, Joe and I will love each other all the same. You forget, too, that I have known for years already how Joe felt about you. If that never made me question his love for me, then seeing him act on those feelings certainly will not. So I do not want you to worry about these things anymore, tesoro,” and Booker was helpless to do anything but nod.

“Well,” he began. “We had a really nice time, I took Joe to one of my favourite restaurants,” and before he knew it the train was pulling to a stop, the trip having passed amazingly quickly while he was telling Nicky all about his date with Joe. “Welcome to Provins,” Nicky said with a grin as they got off the train, and Booker blinked at him, a little confused because with Nicky’s pronunciation, it sounded like Provence, and he  knew that while trains had gotten faster over the years, he couldn’t possibly be in the region of his birth after just an hour. 

“Where are we?” He asked, looking around at what so far appeared to be a nondescript French town. “Medieval town, you’ll like it, I think,” Nicky remarked, taking Booker’s hand in his own and guiding them away from the station. “Joe and I first stopped by here in 1420, I think it was. It was well-known for hosting these fairs twice a year where merchants from all over Europe and North Africa would come to sell their goods. I bought a large amount of the most beautiful maroon fabric here one year,” he recalled. “I used it for years to sew shirts for Joe, he looked so good in the colour.”

He winked at Booker. “I wish that you had been with us, back then—but I figured that this is the next best thing. They’re having a medieval Christmas market,” he explained. “Who knows how accurate it is, but I thought it might be fun and might give you a little idea of what it was like, when Joe and I used to stop by here to trade.” He gave Booker a hopeful little smile, and Booker’s heart clenched. He understood the sentiment and it warmed him all over—he had always felt like he could never compete with the weight of the hundreds of years that Joe and Nicky had spent together, yet here Nicky was, trying to share those years with Booker as best as he could. “Merci,” he whispered, squeezing Nicky’s hand hard. 

Provins was two towns, really—the quaint lower town and then, up a steep staircase, the Medieval ville haute, with its imposing stone walls, half-timbered houses and the 12th century castle. The upper town was a hive of activity, with stands as far as Booker could see and people milling about in medieval clothes. This was going to be fun, Booker thought, and then he smelled a rich aroma of potatoes and cream and he broke out into a huge smile. “Tartiflette!” He exclaimed. “We have to get some, Nicky.” They fed each other forkfuls of the hot potato-bacon-cheese mixture, huddled together by a fire pit, their knees toasty warm. Once they were full to the brim, they washed it down with a cup of mulled wine for Nicky and mulled apple juice for Booker, which a woman ladled out of an enormous vat, the smell of spices cloying in the air. Booker let Nicky take him around the stands, marvelling at the craftsmanship of most of the items. Nicky couldn’t help himself from eyeing up a short squat knife with an intricately carved handle, and Booker laughed, nudging his side. “You should get it,” he encouraged him. Nicky shrugged. “I don’t need it,” he argued, and Booker surprised himself by pressing a kiss to Nicky’s cheek. “But you want it. You should treat yourself, mon cher,” and Nicky gave in. Booker idled by a woodworking stand, first admiring some of the kitchen utensils, before his attention was caught by a little puzzle ball. “It’ll take a while before she’s old enough to play with it,” he said tentatively, rolling the toy back and forth in his hand, and it was Nicky’s turn to do the convincing. “You should get it for her, and someday we can tell her that you bought it for her on our first date,” he said softly, and Booker nodded, fishing the bills out of his wallet. “She’s going to be a little confused why we had our first date when I was already seven months pregnant,” he teased, and Nicky laughed. “We will find an appropriate way to explain it to her, when the time comes,” he reassured Booker. “After all, it will not even be the most difficult thing that we have to explain to her. And as long as she grows up surrounded by love, it will not matter much.”

The woodworker eyed them knowingly as Booker stepped up to pay, Nicky’s hand steadying on his waist. “Expecting your first child?” He asked, and Nicky stepped in to answer, taking the pressure off of Booker. “My first, yes,” he replied, and Booker’s heart would apparently never stop doing that funny little jump when Nicky or Joe talked about Juliette being theirs. “My fourth,” Booker said wryly, and it didn’t cause him as much pain as it would have once. He could never pretend that this was his first pregnancy, could never forget carrying his sons, watching them take their first steps and play with little wooden toys like the one that he had just bought for Juliette. But he was ready to allow himself to savour this new joy, this second chance at being a father.

“That reminds me,” he told Nicky once they had walked away from the stand. “I have something I want to ask you, I already talked to Joe about it last night and we’re in agreement. I want to give the baby your last name, if it’s alright with you. Since biologically she’s Joe’s and mine, I wanted her to have something that’s all yours. If it’s okay.”

Nicky looked taken aback, and he blinked a few times as if he was running it over in his head. “Thank you,” he said finally, his voice a bit rough. “I didn’t—didn’t expect that. I didn’t need it, you know I will care for her no matter what—but I really appreciate that.” He pulled his coat tighter around himself, looking vaguely stunned. “Juliette di Genova,” he said softly, weighing it in his mind. It wouldn’t be her only name, of course—each of them had ten aliases, but it would be her real name, her true name, and that made him more emotional than he would have expected. “Thank you, Booker, truly. I never, ever thought that I would be a father,” and the awe in his voice warmed Booker faster than any fire. “You’ll be a good one,” Booker assured him. “You and Joe both.” He had seen them with children before on missions, how patient and playful they were, and he knew that they would be a thousand times more careful with their own daughter. 

Just then a horn sounded, and they realised that a group was about to start playing live music. The steady drum beat and the quavering of the bagpipes was enticing, and a crowd was already gathering, some couples lining up to dance. “Should we go watch?” Nicky asked. “Though I’m not sure this is a real medieval song, honestly, I never heard this before.”

They stayed on the sidelines for the first couple of songs, tapping their feet in time with the music to keep from getting too cold, and then when a particularly uptempo air started, Nicky practically jumped in excitement. “I know this song,” he said excitedly, and Booker could only imagine how it would feel to hear a familiar tune again after hundreds of years. He had become uncommonly emotional when he had looked up the campaign songs from the Grande Armée online, and that had only been a couple hundred years ago. “Do you want to dance?” Nicky asked, offering his hand. “This one’s easy, I promise.” They stepped a bit to the side so that they would have a little more space, and Booker let Nicky show him the steps. Booker had always been a good dancer, had enjoyed going to country dances with his wife when they were young, and he managed to pick up the steps fairly well, even though he was a bit more ungainly than usual with his bump in the way. He laughed as Nicky twirled him around, a bit giddy, and wondered for the thousandth time how he had gotten so lucky as to have this.

They danced three dances before Booker became too out of breath to continue, and in the third dance, the cloudy sky gave way and a few flakes of snow started to drift down. It seemed, somehow, like that was what they had been missing to make the day perfect, and Booker tilted his head up to catch a few flakes on his cheeks. When he looked back over at Nicky, he caught the other man staring at him, captivated, and Booker’s cheeks flushed. “What is it?” He asked, and Nicky blushed in turn. “You’re just very beautiful right now,” he admitted, and, oh, there was that funny feeling in Booker’s chest again. “Oh,” he said dumbly, and it wasn’t hard to see where this was going when Nicky’s eyes dropped a bit to look at Booker’s lips. “Come here,” Booker urged, and Nicky went readily, kissing him just on the edge of too deeply for public. 

When they parted, Booker was more breathless than he had been when they had stopped dancing, and he was still smiling when he slid his hand into Nicky’s. “Should we head home so that we can have dinner with Joe?” He asked, and Nicky nodded, shooting one last fond glance at the castle he had known for centuries before they started to head back down the hill towards the train station.

As much fun as he had had, Booker was grateful to be off his feet, and he couldn’t stifle the soft groan as he sunk into the train seat. Nicky looked over at him, clearly concerned, and Booker shook his head. “I’m fine, just a little sore, my ankles are pretty swollen at this point,” he explained, and that didn’t chase the soft frown off of Nicky’s face. “When we get home, I’ll massage them,” he said, determined, and Booker smiled, resting his head on Nicky’s shoulder. “Thank you. I had a really nice time today,” he whispered, snuggling into Nicky’s soft hoodie, and the other man pressed a kiss to the top of Booker’s head. “Me too,” he acknowledged. “I think this is going to work, Book. The three of us, we’re pretty good at taking care of each other when we put our mind to it, aren’t we?”

“I will cherish you and Joe and our daughter for the rest of my life, if I’m allowed to,” Booker murmured, and Nicky’s arm tightened a bit where it was wrapped around his shoulders. “I forgot how it felt to have this much hope.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know if there are any particular things you’d like to see in this universe and I can see about trying to work them in!


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because of course this is how Nicky’s massages would end up...

Joe welcomed them back with a kiss each and the rich smell of beef stew which he had simmering away, and Nicky helped Booker out of his coat and then put it away while Booker proudly showed Joe the little wooden puzzle ball he had bought for their daughter and chattered away about his date with Nicky. “I will make you a tartiflette that doesn’t have pork,” he was promising Joe when Nicky came back, and Nicky stifled a smile.

“Now sit down, Book,” he encouraged, “and let me try and help your sore ankles like I promised.” He knew that Joe would shoot him a concerned look at that, and explained “Sébastien said that his legs and feet get sore easily, these days, with the baby and all. I thought maybe I could make him feel a bit better.”

“Nicky does give good massages,” Joe acknowledged, and oh, the look on his face was nearly as dirty as when he and Nicky would talk about Malta. 

“How do you want me?” Booker asked, before immediately cringing at how that came across. He bent down to try and get his boots off, but Joe was already bending down on one knee to do it for him. “Please, let me,” and carefully he lifted first one foot then the other in order to leave Booker in his socked feet.

“It’s probably easiest if you lay down on your back,” Nicky suggested, and Joe sat down on the bed, cozying into the pillows and beckoning Booker to lay his head in his lap. Booker settled there, sighing in happiness to be curled up on the soft bed so close to Joe, and he shot Nicky a smile before he closed his eyes, relaxing as he felt Nicky peeling off his socks and then gently starting to massage the arch of his foot. Booker could already feel the tension leeching out of him, and when Joe started stroking his fingers through his hair, he practically melted into the bed and Joe’s lap. 

Nicky clearly was good at this, and Booker didn’t know whether it was the result of some kind of formal training or merely the fruit of many, many years of practice, but he wasn’t complaining. When Nicky began unerringly finding all the pressure points on Booker’s instep and pressing lightly into them, he couldn’t help his soft gasps and relieved groans, and oh, he clearly hadn’t thought through the logistics of what having both of the men he was so attracted to touching him would do to him. “Mm,” Booker murmured, squirming a bit. “That feels so good, Nicolo,” and he didn’t expect anything else from them but these soft touches, never would, but he couldn’t help the way his scent spiked, sharply sweet with desire, or the way he could feel himself growing slick. His eyes flew open, a bit panicked, but Nicky was just smiling knowingly as he sniffed the air.

“Joe, my heart,” he suggested. “Do you want to take care of Booker while I finish up the massage?” His husband nodded, leaning down to press a kiss to Booker’s forehead and leaving his hair behind to stroke his fingers down Booker’s chest. Even through his shirt, the feeling of Joe’s fingers brushing against his nipples drew a mewl from Booker. His milk hadn’t come in yet, but his chest was already a bit puffier, the nipples larger and more tender,and it sent a spike of pleasure that was so sharp it was almost painful through him when Joe touched them. “I think we should explore that later,” Joe murmured, bending low over Booker to whisper in his ear, and Booker could barely keep himself still to allow Nicky to continue his massage. 

“Sorry, my dear, I need to rearrange you,” Joe explained as he carefully slid Booker’s head from his lap, sliding a pillow under it instead, and scooting around so that he could sit at Booker’s side, careful to give Nicky enough room to work. “Is this okay?” Joe asked, as his fingers played first with the hem of Booker’s shirt. Booker nodded, a bit frantic. “Anything,” he assured Joe, and Joe’s eyes crinkled with fondness as he peeled up Booker’s shirt enough to reveal the swell of his belly. 

Joe lavished it with kisses, showing his love to every inch of the stretched skin, and if Booker was itching to have Joe touch him where he was aching with desire, this brought him a special joy as well, seeing Juliette’s father so clearly excited about her arrival. “Your body is a miracle,” Joe murmured against Booker’s bump, and right then Nicky did something wicked with his hands, and Booker arched off the bed, gasping. “Please, Joe,” he begged, and Joe gave a last kiss to Booker’s belly before sliding further down to toy with the elastic band of Booker’s decidedly unsexy pregnancy pants. “Alright?” He asked again, and Booker really appreciated his thoughtfulness, but he felt like he was going to spontaneously combust if he didn’t have relief soon. His libido had been as high in this pregnancy as his three previous ones, except this time he hadn’t had his wife around to satisfy his every need, and he was utterly desperate for it, his scent turned to syrup. “Yes, yes, anything Joe, please,” he urged, and Joe had mercy on him.

He peeled Booker’s pants down to his knees, hands gentle on Booker’s thighs, and Booker was already so far gone that he shivered with every touch on his bare skin. “Right there, Nicky,” he gasped out as Nicky’s fingers dug into just the place on the side of his foot that was so sore, and he was so focused on how Nicky was carefully working the knot out that he was taken completely aback when Joe leaned down and swallowed his cock to the root. Like many omegas, Booker’s length wasn’t exceptionally large, but that didn’t make it any less thrilling to feel himself completely surrounded by warmth, the velvet press of Joe’s tongue on the side of his cock driving him insane. 

He let slip a stream of French curses that had last been in vogue in the 1820s, and when his hips reflexively bucked up, Joe held them down with a gentle grip. “You need to stay still so that Nicky can work on your feet,” Joe explained, pulling off briefly, replacing his mouth with his hand as he looked up at Booker with a grin. “I’d like to see you stay still while the two of you are determined to wreck me,” Booker grumbled, but his complaining cut off quickly when Joe took the tip of his length back between his lips. “You two are so good to me,” Booker babbled, lost in the twin sensations of Joe’s mouth and Nicky’s expert fingers rolling circles onto his heels. “You give me just what I need, oh God, I’m not going to last—“ That didn’t seem to deter Joe, who trailed one finger down to press at where Booker’s slick was gathering, and when his finger slipped inside, just teasing at Booker’s rim, Booker lost it, spilling into Joe’s mouth with a cry.

He came back to himself slowly, realising that Nicky had let go of his feet and that Joe was pressing soft kisses to his hips and tugging his pants back up. “Thank you,” he whispered, and Nicky smiled. “Thank you for letting us take care of you,” he replied, reaching up to ruffle Booker’s hair. “What can I do for you?” Booker asked, because he could smell that they wanted him in return, but Joe just shook his head, pulling Booker’s shirt back down over his belly. “You told us you wanted to go slow,” he reminded Booker. “There will be plenty of time for that later, we just wanted to help you relax.” He kissed Booker, softly. “Rest a bit with Nicky, I’ve got to go do some things for dinner but it won’t be ready for another 45 minutes or so.”

Booker nodded, leaning up to keep Joe’s lips on his for as long as possible, turning his attention to Nicky when Joe finally pulled away. “Viens ici,” Nicky urged him as he sat back against the pillows, beckoning Booker to go snuggle up against his chest, and Booker went gladly, the thought fluttering across his mind that he should have known how much they cared about him when they both perfected their French within the few months after he had joined them. “I never thanked you for learning French for me,” he whispered into Nicky’s shoulder, and Nicky huffed out a little laugh. “Of course, Sébastien, you’re welcome. Though your first language is really Provençal, isn’t it? We didn’t realise that until a bit later. Still time to learn, if you would like to teach us.” He smiled into Booker’s hair, his arm tight around Booker’s back. “It’s funny, isn’t it? With all the years that separate us, you and I are from the same little corner of the world, a couple of hundred kilometres from each other.” Booker nodded sleepily, and whispered “you and Joe and our daughter are my home” in Provençal against Nicky’s collarbone, in his own language because it was a fundamental truth and because it was a soft secret he still wanted to keep to himself.

When Joe came back from checking on the stew and putting together a small salad, a grin broke over him as he sawBooker asleep in Nicky’s arms, one of Nicky’s hands resting protectively on his bump and a fond look on his face. “Well,” Joe decided easily, curling around their other side. “I think the stew will be fine if it simmers for a few more minutes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And then they ate burnt stew! (Just kidding. Their dinner was fine by the time they dragged themselves out of bed to eat it). Next up they will reunite with the rest of the team!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter especially warmed my heart and I hope it does yours, too!

The next morning, they closed up the apartment and headed south to Tuscany, Booker only glancing out the train window a little regretfully as the streets of Paris faded and gave way first to the cités of the suburbs and then to the flat countryside.

The train ride always seemed to take forever, long hours speeding across the plains and then tracking, much slower, through the mountains, but finally in the afternoon they were rolling into the station closest to their house. Andy had left one of their cars in the parking lot for them, and Joe already had one of the sets of keys so it was easy enough to get going, though Booker did wonder why Andy had gone to the trouble of dropping off the car instead of just coming to pick them up, but hey, whatever worked. 

He realised why when he opened up the door to their house, Nicky and Joe behind him carrying his duffel bag, and was greeted with a transformed living room. Streamers had been hung from one corner to the next, there were a truly impressive number of balloons bobbing all around the room, and an enormous three tiered cake on the dining table with an impressively rendered baby carriage in icing. 

“Surprise!” The three women exclaimed, leaping up from the sofa, and Booker paused in his tracks, half in the door and half outside, blinking slowly. “What is—what—“he stammered. “Nile tells me it’s called a baby shower,” Quynh said primly, and Booker hoped fervently that he wasn’t about to cry in the doorway. “Oh,” he said softly, stepping fully inside and taking a closer look at all the decorations. “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble, guys, really, but thank you so much.”

“I think Nile bought every balloon in northern Italy,” Andy remarked wryly, and Booker chuckled a little wetly. “I really appreciate it, honestly, I never expected something like this.” He spotted a little pile of carefully wrapped gifts next to the cake. “We, uh,” Nicky interjected as he saw Booker looking at the gifts, reaching over and placing two other packages on top of the pile. “I know it’s tradition to give gifts for the baby at these things, but we only got a few things for Juliette, because honestly her room is full to bursting as it is—“ and because of what happened at Christmas, Booker thought silently—“so instead we got a few small things for you, Sébastien. We really wanted this to be about celebrating you and thanking you for giving us this precious child.”

“Merci,” Booker replied roughly, pulling Nicky into a too-tight hug. “Truly, this is such a nice surprise to come home to. Juliette and I are very grateful.” “You deserve it and more,” Joe told him, soft with fondness, and Booker felt enveloped by love. 

“Can we start in on the cake?” Nile asked excitedly, clapping her hands together like a little girl. “Quynh and I have had our hands full trying to keep Andy from sampling it before you got here,” she explained, nudging Andy with a grin. Andy only gave a long-suffering sigh. “I helped make it after all,” she protested, and Quynh chuckled. “By helped make it, she means that she taste-tested the frosting,” she teased, and Andy retaliated by ruffling up Quynh’s hair. “A very important task, my heart”, she retorted, and Booker was struck by how brilliantly alive Andy looked now that she had Quynh back. They had been so lost, Andy and him, so fundamentally tired, but with love and care they were blossoming again. 

Once the cake had been handed out, Booker started to open his gifts. Quynh,who had impressed him from the very start with how amazing her fashion sense was for someone who had spent most of the last 500 years locked in a box underwater, gave him two smart maternity outfits, as well as one in his normal size that he could look forward to wearing after the baby was born, and because she couldn’t help herself a few tiny outfits for Juliette as well, including one that matched one of Booker’s. “She’s going to be the most stylish baby in Europe,” Booker said with a grin, and Nicky pressed a kiss to Booker’s shoulder. “You and Juliette will be ashamed to be seen with me in my old T-shirts,” he joked, and they all burst out laughing because nobody cared about fashion less than Nicky, who valued comfort above all else. “Don’t worry, Nicky,” Andy interjected. “While my wife is teaching her to be a little fashionista, I’ll be impressing on her the value of tactical gear from a young age.”

It was a joke, of course, but also there was an undercurrent of seriousness behind it—Booker had already thought about how vital it would be for their daughter to learn to protect herself as she grew up, though they would of course do everything possible to ensure that she never faced any serious danger. It was especially important given that they didn’t know yet if Kozak’s theory had been right that the baby would inherit their enhanced healing, and Booker wasn’t taking any chances with his little girl’s safety; he had already asked Andy to help train Juliette in some basic self-defense moves once she was old enough. 

Next was Andy’s gift, which unsurprisingly was a rare book that Booker had had his eye on for years. He exclaimed with joy when he pulled it out of the box, stroking over the cover reverently. “Thank you, Andy, I can’t imagine where you found it,” he exclaimed, wrapping his arms around Andy and pressing a kiss to her cheek which sent a flush rippling across her skin. “You’re welcome, nobody else will appreciate it as much as you will,” she told him a bit gruffly, never sure quite how to accept open affection from anyone but Quynh. 

“This kind of goes along with that,” Nile said, handing him a thick and unexpectedly heavy box. “I asked Andy and she said that she didn’t think you had anything quite like this. I thought it would be nice for you to try something new, and it might be something you could do when you’re stuck at home more because of the baby.” Curious, Booker opened up the box to find a gorgeous set of tools—he wasn’t sure exactly what they were for at first and then as he sifted through all the items in the box, he started to get an idea. “Is this for—“ “For bookbinding, yeah. I know you have some really old books, some of which are kind of falling apart at the edges by now, and I thought you might enjoy learning how to fix them up and make new covers for them.” 

“Thank you, Nile,” Booker said sincerely, and his heart felt like it was growing three sizes like in that Christmas film she had insisted on showing all of them. “Later I can bind up all of Juliette’s drawings,” he said with a smile, already the proud father. “I hope she inherits your artistic ability, Joe,” and Joe bent down to kiss him softly even as Nicky huffed out a laugh. “Alright, I guess that I know what we need to give you next,” he admitted. “Joe wanted to present this to you in a fancier format, but I told him that given what Nile was giving you, well...” he shrugged, going to get a package from the table. “I hope you like it,” he said a little shyly, and he and Joe curled up at Booker’s sides to see his reaction as he opened the gift. 

Booker tore into the paper to reveal a simple purple folder, but when he opened it he found a wealth of papers. He recognised Joe’s art style immediately, and when he pulled out the first sheet it took his breath away. It had to be the most recent one of the bunch, because it showed Booker on his date with Joe, all bundled up and down by the river in Paris, gazing out at the lights of the city. “Oh,” Booker said, a little punched-out sound, because Joe had been telling him that he loved him, Nicky had told him that Joe loved him, and yet he didn’t fully believe it until he saw the care that Joe had sunk into every line of Booker’s form. He had never thought he was beautiful, not until he saw himself through Joe’s eyes, and suddenly he understood, and it was a lot to take in all at once. It was even more when he looked at the side of the page, where Nicky had written a few lines—in French, too, Booker noted. “Normally, my heart aches whenever I am separated from my Joe,” he wrote in careful cursive. “But this is a new feeling, being glad that he is out enjoying what he had longed for for years now. I can’t wait to welcome them both home and to hear about their evening together.”

“This is....” Booker pressed a hand to his heart, a little overwhelmed, and Joe wrapped an arm around his waist, a silent comfort. “It’s a lot,” he explained, and Joe just hugged him closer. “We wanted to try and show you how we see you,” he explained, and Booker nodded. “I think I see now,” he murmured, more than a little awed, and with their support at his side he began flipping through the other papers. It was the record of a whole life together, and he realised that it was too many drawings for Joe to possibly have done just in the last few weeks. “Ah, yes,” Joe remarked a bit sheepishly when Booker asked. “I told you that I’ve been carrying a torch for you for a while, well. At some point in the years you drifted into my regular rotation of subjects to sketch, alongside Nicky.” “I went back and added the words to some of Joe’s older drawings,” Nicky explained. “Then together we thought about what other parts of our life were important to capture, and he worked on putting those to paper.” “I put the finishing touches on it while you and Nicky were out on your date,” Joe added with a grin. “I was very thankful that he took you out for the whole day so I could finish that last drawing of you by the Seine.”

There were so many moments captured in the pages, the old and new, the beautiful and the raw. There was Booker in the Russian snow when they had found him, with Nicky’s sparse prose telling how surprised and pleased the team had been to have a new member after so many years. There was Booker at home, when they brought him back to his family as he had asked, and it sent the familiar wave of sadness through him, but it also filled him with an indescribable joy to see the drawing that Joe had done from memory of Booker’s own cottage, Geneviève at the door with a baby Jean-Pierre on her hip and a tiny Guillaume hiding behind her skirts. “I will always remember that day you waved goodbye to us and went to greet your family,” Nicky had written. “It was the first time we got to see you as a father, got to see how your children were the light of your life, and we are so lucky that you will bring all that love to our Juliette soon.”

There was Booker jumping off the sofa in joy in front of the football match when France scored, Booker lounging in a sleek suit sometime in the 1920s, Booker and Nicky in the middle of the Cuban Revolution. And then so, so many snapshots of the past few months—Booker and Nile decorating the Christmas tree, Booker laughing at the ridiculous ornaments she had bought, Booker and Nicky looking at the ultrasound pictures of Juliette, Booker contemplative with a hand on the swell of his belly, Booker only covered with a sheet, blinking awake slowly. 

“Not all of them might be appropriate for Juliette,” Nicky teased as he saw Booker’s eyes lingering on the tasteful nude. “But we thought maybe you could choose the ones you wanted her to see, and bind them into a book so that she can learn about how her family came to be.” “I will,” Booker said, nearly lost within the wave of emotion, and he didn’t notice when the three women left the room to give him some privacy with Joe and Nicky. “I didn’t know,” he whispered, carefully filing the papers back into the folder and slumping a bit into their grip, resting his head on Joe’s shoulder. “I never knew that I...that I brought something to your life, like that,” and he hid his face in Joe’s neck as Nicky stroked his fingers lightly down Booker’s side, soothing. “You brought so much to our lives from the first moment we dreamt of you,” Nicky said seriously. “That has shifted and changed over time, but we cared about you even then.” “I see that now,” Booker said softly, feeling like everything was slotting into place, the old wounds of the lost lonely years slowly starting to heal. “I will try not to forget again,” he vowed, and he could feel Joe’s smile against the top of his head. “Well, that’s why you have us, and why you have that book,” he explained easily. “So that we can remind you whenever you forget.”

There were still a few smaller gifts to open, and Nile had plans for a fancy dinner in a few hours, but all that could wait, the time to allow Booker to just rest between them, pondering how they had managed to turn his world on its head.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took longer than I was expecting but hope you enjoy!

Booker was eight months pregnant and feeling like a hot air balloon when Nile came to talk to him. He had been rearranging things in Juliette’s room for about the hundredth time, sifting through the mass of cuddly toys the team had gotten for her and trying to imagine which ones she would like the best, then carefully arranging them in the little crib. 

The room was tiny, but full of love. In addition to the charcoal drawings of Paris through the ages which Joe had hung directly above her crib, he had surprised Booker one day with an intricate mural he had painted on the opposite wall. It was of a jungle scene—Booker couldn’t quite recognise which specific jungle it was supposed to be, or if it was just an imaginary jungle Joe had concocted to try and fit as many colourful animals as possible in. There were brightly painted macaws on the treetops and every kind of monkey imaginable swinging between the branches, leopards padding around the brush and elephants off in the distance. Joe had drawn all of them in a realistic style, but so that they looked almost playful—“I didn’t want to scare her,” he explained to Booker with a soft smile. And in one corner of the jungle, there were several small figures—Andy, her axe slung over her back, helping Quynh up onto a horse with what was basically heart eyes; Nile playing with a baby leopard, scratching at its fur; Booker and Nicky watching proudly as a little girl balanced on a log, one of them on each side of her to support her in case she lost her balance. 

As much as they loved the mural, both Booker and Nicky had voiced objections to the first draft—Nicky had worried over including weapons in the painting, but Joe had pointed out that Juliette would inevitably see Andy sparring with her axe before she was a toddler, and that they might as well normalise it, given the kind of lives they led. In fact, as Booker reminded Nicky, Andy and Nile had already presented Booker with a lumpily wrapped package that ended up being a little foam version of Andy’s labrys, tied up in a bow and labelled “baby’s first axe”. They had gotten a good laugh out of Booker with that one, and he had to admit that the toy was kind of cute.

Booker, meanwhile, had nudged Joe playfully when he first saw the artwork on Juliette’s wall, and asked him why he hadn’t painted himself into the mural. “Oh,” Joe said, laughing a bit. “You know I never even thought about it?” “You should be there too,” Booker confirmed gently, pressing a kiss to the corner of Joe’s mouth. “I want her to look over and see her whole family there, watching over her.” Joe added himself in then, perched in a tree with his legs swinging, looking down fondly at Nicky, Booker and Juliette.

Booker loved the mural, and he would often sit in the rocking chair in Juliette’s room and look over at all the details that Joe had included, and that was where Nile found him one early February morning. “Booker,” she said, very seriously but with the twinkle in her eye that made him know she was messing with him a little. “I have to talk to you about something.” 

“Of course,” he replied with a smile, setting Juliette’s stuffed fox back in her crib and sitting down in the rocking chair with a soft groan; his back was bothering him more and more as he got closer to his due date. He had known, from the first day he met her—even before he knew how his life was about to go off the rails—that Nile would be good for the team, and she had been, lifting all of their moods, helping him through his pregnancy, helping Quynh readjust to the team and helping Andy get used to her mortality. 

“Do you know what next Friday is?” Nile asked, and Booker blinked at the unexpected question. “Uh,” he murmured, trying to think of the date. Truth be told, the dates all tended to blend together when you were more than two hundred years old, and he shrugged. “Next Friday is Valentine’s Day,” Nile said solemnly. “And since you have two devoted boyfriends now—“ Booker tried to interject at the label, because they hadn’t given it a name yet, really, their relationship, but Nile just brushed aside his protests—“you need to start thinking about how you’re going to celebrate.”

Never in a million years would Booker have thought he would be celebrating Valentine’s Day. He knew what it was, sure; it had become hard to miss in recent years. He had watched as it gradually became commercialised, as the handwritten notes that had prevailed during Victorian times gave way to mass-produced cards and then to increasingly elaborate gifts; he had seen as Valentine’s decor had started taking over shops and restaurants had concocted special holiday meals which he thought was probably justan excuse to increase their prices. 

Despite his misgivings about the mass Hallmark-induced hysteria, he had to admit that he had stared a little longingly in past years when he had seen couples all dressed up on their way to their Valentine’s dates, clearly in love. He had to admit that, well, maybe this year it might be nice to spend some quality time with Joe and Nicky, to do something romantic for them. 

“Well, I didn’t really have plans,” he admitted. “But I think I can piece together a celebration. Thank you for reminding me, Nile,” he offered, and she brightened. “You’re welcome! I’m also teaching Quynh about it, I figured she was more likely to convince than Andy,” and Booker burst out laughing at that because it was so true. 

Something occurred to him, then, something that had been nagging at him. “Nile?” He asked, a bit hesitantly. “Does it bother you that, you know, all of us have romantic attachments within the group?” He had worried that she might feel like the odd one out, like he had for so long. She chuckled, patting him on the back. “You’re sweet, you know that? But no, not really. I mean, I guess I hope to meet someone eventually, but it’s not a huge priority for me right now. Still trying to figure out this new life, you know? And I’ve never minded being single, I would rather be single than in a bad relationship. There will be plenty of time for romance,” she added with a grin, and he couldn’t help but pull her into a tight hug. “Thanks for everything, Nile. I’m proud to have a sister like you,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head. 

These days, Booker normally took a while to fully wake up in the morning, luxuriating in the warmth of their bed—they had tried, when they first got back to the Italian safe house, to go back to sleeping with Booker in his own room and Nicky and Joe in theirs, for the sake of taking it slow and making sure they had enough space, but that had lasted all of two days before Joe and Nicky had piled into Booker’s room and curled around him—before having to get up on his sore feet. 

The morning of the 14th, however, he was buzzing with excitement, and he slipped out of bed before the other two men were awake, showering and slipping on some relaxed clothes to start. He had a slightly fancier outfit planned for later, though he was sure that Nicky and Joe would understand that in his condition he couldn’t dress up as elegantly as he might have otherwise. He made himself a quick coffee—decaf, sadly—to shake the last of the sleep from his eyes, then went into Juliette’s room. It was funny—even though he was always carrying her inside him, he felt the closest to her there, in her room surrounded by what were going to be her toys and clothes. “Good morning, my darling,” he greeted her, cradling his bump. “I brought you a little something,” he murmured, setting a soft red blanket in her crib. “I can’t wait until you’re here and I can wrap you up all nice and cozy in that. Today is Valentine’s Day,” he explained to her, “and you’re my number one Valentine, sweetheart. I’m going to treat your fathers later, but I wanted to talk to you first, because there’s nobody in this world that I love more than you. I didn’t even know that my heart was still capable of so much love, but you’ve given me a new start in life, my darling,” he whispered. “I will never be able to thank you enough, but I will try and be a good papa to you, keep you safe and happy. I want you to have whatever kind of life you want, Juliette. You don’t have to join us in fighting if you don’t want to, and if you’re mortal I would encourage you not to. Whatever your dreams are, Joe and Nicky and I will work to make them a reality. We love you so, so much and we haven’t even met you yet.” He talked to her for a while more, telling her about his plans for the day, and then he got up from the rocking chair with a soft groan and padded into the kitchen.

Quynh was already there, frowning confusedly at the coffee maker, and Booker grinned over at her. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Quynh,” he greeted and she rewarded him with a smile. “Thanks, Booker,” she replied, and he had come to really enjoy the way his nickname sounded in her accent. “Nile has explained to me what an important holiday it is, so I’m trying to make breakfast for my wife, but I don’t understand how this machine works, and I know that Andy thinks coffee is the most important part of breakfast.” “It’s some complicated Italian thing Nicky bought,” Booker replied, “took me ages to figure it out too. I’m making breakfast for Joe and Nicky, want to join forces? I was going to make French toast.” 

Together they managed to rustle up platters of French toast with powdered sugar and strawberries on top; Booker left a little plate of it outside Nile’s bedroom, not wanting her to be left out, and then he and Quynh went back to their respective lovers. “See you later,” Booker called, and Quynh gave him a little wink. “Maybe quite a bit later,” she replied, making him chuckle.

Joe and Nicky were awake by the time he got back to their room, their eyes widening as they caught sight of the breakfast he had prepared. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” Booker murmured, a bit sheepishly, and Joe pulled him into a kiss, Nicky taking the platter of French toast and the utensils out of Booker’s hands. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” Joe whispered against Booker’s lips. “I didn’t even think about it being today.”

“Neither did I,” Nicky chimed in, a brief shadow passing over his face. “I didn’t—I mean, we didn’t get you anything, we’ve never celebrated it before—“ Booker shook his head, curling up between them and passing out plates. “I didn’t expect you to,” he replied easily. “Juliette and I just wanted to do something nice for the most important men in our lives.” He grinned. “I think Quynh is planning a sex marathon,” he told them, resting back against the pillows as he ate. “As for us, well, there’s a food festival a few towns over that I thought we might go to, then I made a dinner reservation,” and he revelled in how both of their eyes turned fond. 

“You have so much love to give,” Nicky remarked, wrapping his arm around Booker’s shoulders and squeezing briefly. “I don’t know how I didn’t see that before,” he murmured, a bit in awe, and Booker curled closer to Nicky, entangling his fingers with Joe’s. “I thought all my love died with my family,” Booker replied. “But the two of you and our little one have given me a second chance.” Nicky leaned down for a brief kiss, his fingers tight on Booker’s shoulder, and Booker leaned into his touch. “I want Juliette to take her time and I don’t want her to be born until she’s ready, obviously,” Booker admitted, “but I also can’t wait for her to be born, to see her and hold her,” and Joe had to lean down to kiss Booker’s belly at that. “I know,” Nicky agreed, shooting a small smile over at the two of them. “I feel the same. I keep wondering what she’ll look like; any mixture of you two is bound to be beautiful.”

“Do you think it’ll be very different, having a daughter instead of sons?” Booker asked contemplatively, finishing his plate of French toast and setting it aside before lying down, his head in Joe’s lap and his feet curled against Nicky’s thigh. “Probably not,” Joe mused. “Not for us, anyway, it’s not like we’re likely to impose antiquated gender roles.” Booker nodded, yawning softly as he snuggled into Joe’s lap. “Even so, I’m glad she’ll have three amazing aunts around.” He chewed his lip, thinking. “Have you thought about what you want her to call you? I guess we can’t all be Papa Booker, Papa Joe and Papa Nicky,” he joked, sighing happily as Joe ran his fingers through Booker’s hair which was getting shaggier by the day. “You’ll probably want to be babbo, won’t you amore?” Joe asked, and Nicky shrugged. “Sure, but I don’t really mind what she calls me, honestly.” He smiled a little wryly. “I definitely never had any little nicknames for my own father, it was always signore with him, when he bothered to call me into his office to see how I was progressing with my studies.” He leaned down to press a kiss to Booker’s ankle, a promise. “I will never be that way with you, Juliette,” he pledged, and Booker shot him a soft smile.“I know you won’t, don’t worry.” 

He paused a moment. “My sons called me papa when they were small,” he remarked quietly, and Nicky’s grip tightened on his ankle. “Would you like her to call you that?” he asked, equally softly. “Or would it be too painful?” Booker closed his eyes, thinking for a moment. “I think I want her to,” he admitted. “Even though you’re right, it will be a little painful. Thinking about them always is, but somehow—somehow not thinking about them, not cherishing their memory is even worse.” “Papa it is, then,” Joe agreed, fingers leaving Booker’s hair to trace down his cheek. “And I can be her baba.” 

“You’re going to be such good fathers,” Booker murmured, then pushed himself back to a seated position with a groan. “It would be all too easy to just stay here and talk and cuddle,” he admitted, “but that’s not exactly what I had planned for today. Let me take a shower and then we can head out?”

The food festival had taken over nearly every street in a picturesque hilltop town, and Booker and Joe strolled along hand in hand from stand to stand, amused as they watched Nicky charming all the old Italian ladies selling everything from bread to homemade jam. By the time they got past the prepared foods section and to the part of the market where all of the town’s restaurants had set up tables to sell tiny amuse bouche versions of their most popular dishes, Nicky had accumulated an absurd amount of free gifts, from handmade chocolates to stone-ground polenta. He turned to face them a little sheepishly, and Booker just laughed, letting his hand slip from Joe’s so that Nicky could take it instead. He was always cautious about that, never wanting to monopolise either of their affections. He loved both of them, anyway, so he didn’t mind sharing. 

The individual portions might have been tiny, but they were so delicious that they tried ten or fifteen different things, until they were groaning with how full they were in the car on the way home. “I don’t know how we’re going to work up enough of an appetite to enjoy dinner at wherever you booked, Sébastien,” Joe complained, sprawled in the backseat while Nicky drove and Booker rode shotgun. “Spar you when we get home?” Nicky asked hopefully, and that’s how they spent the afternoon, grappling with each other while Booker lounged on a chaise, sipping one of the mocktails that Nile had taught him how to make, a legacy of her year as a part-time bartender in her early 20s. Booker couldn’t complain about the view: Joe was wearing tiny shorts over leggings, and Nicky had such an intense look on his face, his seafoam eyes stormy as he countered Joe’s moves with nearly a millennium of practice.

By the time it was time to go to dinner at a small bistro nearby, Joe and Nicky had worked up a sweat and a renewed appetite, and as for Booker, well, ever since the first miserable nauseous months of his pregnancy, he was hungry almost all the time. He dressed up in one of the outfits Quynh had given him for his baby shower, and even Nicky dressed up a bit, while Joe pulled out all the stops with tight black slacks and a maroon button-down with the top few buttons undone, freeing a tantalising sliver of skin that Booker immediately wanted to press his lips to—and by the look on Nicky’s face, he felt the same. Booker shot a little playful wink at Nicky, savouring the way the other man’s cheeks flushed at having been caught out. It was so refreshing, after years of silence, not to have to hide his affection for the two of them.

The restaurant wasn’t anything incredibly fancy, just one of the atmospheric places that had been passed from generation to generation for nearly a hundred years, stone walls and a huge fireplace chasing away the February cold. They lost track of time sitting there, talking and eating the hearty winter food, until they realised that they were nearly the only people left in the restaurant. “Oh boy, I guess we better go,” Joe remarked, and Booker reached out to hold both his hand and Nicky’s across the table. “I have dessert at home, don’t worry,” he reassured them with a smile. “What do you say we go home, get curled up in bed in our pajamas and I’ll bring it out?” 

The more advanced his pregnancy was, the more Booker had come to crave comfort—partly because his body was growing so uncomfortable, his belly unwieldy, his back strained and his ankles swollen, and partly because his long-suppressed omega instincts were coming to the fore. He made sure that Joe and Nicky were in comfy sweats and wrapped up in the tangle of blankets that was slowly coalescing into a proper nest, before he kissed each of them quickly. “I’ll be right back,” he murmured, tiptoeing to the kitchen—decidedly ignoring the noises filtering from the bedroom where Andy and Quynh had been hidden away for most of the day—and bringing out the chocolate-covered strawberries he had made the night before. He popped open a bottle of champagne and poured a glass for both Joe and Nicky, bringing it back into the bedroom and enjoying the surprised looks on their faces. “Thank you very much, darling,” Joe said as he took his glass of champagne and set the plate of strawberries in between them as Booker settled onto the bed as well. “Today has really been nice, and such a surprise, neither of us expected any of this.” 

Booker smiled a little shyly, fussing with the covers. “It was a surprise to me too, when Nile asked me what I was doing for Valentine’s Day, but it was nice to think about spending it with you two,” he replied. “Of having a reason to celebrate.” He laid a hand on his belly. “So many reasons to celebrate,” he whispered. Eyes as intense as they had been when he was sparring with Joe that afternoon, Nicky picked up a strawberry, but instead of moving it to his own mouth his fingers unerringly found Booker’s, slipping the sweet treat inside. “Sebastien Le Livre,” Nicky said quietly, gaze never leaving Booker’s. “I’m falling in love with you,” and Booker’s heart felt so full it could burst as the three of them traded kisses and bites of strawberry until they fell asleep in an impossibly tangled jumble.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe one more chapter in this particular story, and then I’ll start a new one with bits of their life with Juliette :)

Juliette Andromache di Genova was born on Leap Day, surrounded by her family in astone house only a few hundred kilometres and nine hundred and fifty-some years apart from where the man whose last name she shared had been born.

Booker had never seen Joe and Nicky so panicked as when he woke up gasping and clutching his middle, and they seemed to be incapable of calming down no matter how he tried to reassure them. “It’s okay,” he told them over and over again. “I’ve done this before, it will be fine, just go get Andy,” he urged them, and Nicky practically ran out of the room in his haste. It was strange, to see stoic Nicky, who had faced unspeakable horrors calmly, so worked up—and it touched Booker’s heart, knowing that Nicky cared so deeply about him and the baby.

When they had talked about it earlier in his pregnancy, Booker had roundly rejected going to a hospital for the birth. “I gave birth to all three of my sons at home,” he insisted. “I know what to do, and I want her to be born here, with us, in our home,” and they had agreed after Andy had casually mentioned that she had spent some time as a midwife a few thousand years ago. “I’ve done pretty much every job there is,” she admitted with a grin, “but I think I’ll remember alright how to take care of Booker,” and that settled it.

Andy took one look at Joe and Nicky’s frenetic pacing and barked out a laugh. “You two need to calm down,” she told them sternly. “Go get yourselves together and then you can come back, you’re not any help to him if you’re like this.” Nicky tried to protest, but she shooed them out, chuckling as she came back to Booker. “There now, you need a little peace and quiet not all that fussing, don’t you?” Booker laughed, relaxed in between contractions. “I understand, it’s their first child, but it was driving me a bit nuts,” he admitted, letting Andy examine him with the lack of embarrassment that came from two centuries of close quarters.

Joe came back in first, offering Booker a cup full of ice chips and a sheepish look. “Sorry,” he murmured as he sat at Booker’s side, holding his hand. “I just need you and the baby to be okay,” and Booker squeezed his hand tightly. “We’re okay,” he promised Joe. “And we’re going to get to meet her soon.” The thought brought tears to his eyes—though that was perhaps also the pain.

Nicky, Booker later learned, had to be calmed down by both Quynh and Nile before he could steel himself enough to come back into the room, but he made it there in time for the end of the birth. Booker’s labour was blessedly short, all things considered, and he did feel like his body still remembered what to do, even though it had been nearly two hundred years since his last child had been born. All of his muscles remembered how to push, even as they were screaming with strain, and then there was a beat of silence, Booker craning his neck to see, and then he heard an ear-splitting wail that sent his heart soaring. 

“Let me see her,” he pleaded, and Andy shot him a grin. “She’s kind of a mess right now, you sure you don’t want me to clean her up first?” she asked, and Booker chuckled weakly. “As if I haven’t seen far worse than a little blood and mess. Let me see my daughter,” he begged, and he didn’t have to ask again, because Andy placed the little girl on his chest.

Even covered in gunk, Booker could tell how beautiful she was. She had Joe’s skin and hair, but when she blinked up at him, it was Booker’s own eyes looking back at him, and he beamed down at her. “Oh, my little love,” he whispered. “Look at her, Joe. She’s the best thing we ever did,” and Joe was openly sobbing as he pressed worshipful fingers to his daughter’s chubby cheeks. 

“Nicky,” Andy asked. “Do you want to clean her up while I fix up Booker?” Nicky nodded, looking as if nothing in his near-millennium of life had prepared him for the experience of holding the little girl in his arms. Andy wiped Booker down efficiently with a warm washcloth, then helped him get up so that she could put new sheets on the bed and gave him a clean robe to shrug into. “There,” she murmured as he settled back against the pillows. “Now you can just rest and enjoy your time with your daughter.” She peered over at the baby in Nicky’s arms, taking a close look at her for the first time. “Gosh, she’s like a mini Joe,” she remarked. “Well, I knew my eyes were my best feature, so I contented myself with giving her those,” Booker joked, snuggling close to Joe as they watched Nicky holding the newborn. 

“Our special girl,” Nicky said softly. “Of course she had to be born on a special day.” Booker groaned, laughing a bit. “I hope she doesn’t hate us when she realises that she only gets a real birthday once every four years,” he remarked, and Andy chuckled. “She’ll get over it after a century or two,” and Booker swallowed deeply at that. “We don’t even know if, you know. If she’ll have centuries.” The thought made him sad as it always did, though he had come to accept the possibility and knew that he would savour whatever time he had with her. Andy clapped him on the shoulder, looking him straight in the eyes. “Have a little faith, Book,” she encouraged him. “Are you up for quick visitors? I’m sure that Quynh and Nile are chomping at the bit to come see her,” and Booker nodded, wrapping an arm around Nicky as he sat down on the bed, Juliette still cradled in his arms.

Nile gasped when she came in and saw the small bundle Nicky was holding, rushing over to get a closer look. “Oh my god, you guys, she’s beautiful,” she gushed. “She’s going to break some hearts someday,” Quynh agreed, reaching out carefully and smiling when the baby reflexively grasped her finger. “Strong little one, too. Congratulations, you three,” she said warmly. “I believe all of our lives will be richer through having this little girl in them,” and Booker couldn’t agree more. Look at how much richer his life had already become during his pregnancy, and none of that compared to the pure love which he felt looking down at his newborn daughter.

Nile was babbling away to the baby, and Booker chuckled when he heard her introduce herself as “Nile Freeman, immortal-in-training and definitely your favourite aunt.” Andy rolled her eyes. “I’m obviously going to be her favourite aunt since I’m going to teach her how to play with pointy things,” and Nicky winced. “Not for a few years, I hope,” already feeling protective over the little girl, and Andy’s face softened. “Not for a good few years,” she agreed, and then she took her wife’s hand. “Come on, let’s leave the lovebirds alone with their daughter,” she suggested, and Nile reluctantly drew herself away from Juliette. “I’ll see you later, Juli,” she called, which earned a soft cry from the baby.

The door closed, the three women’s voices slowly fading, and it was just Nicky, Joe and Booker alone with their little girl. Nicky passed her over to Joe, who hadn’t really had a chance to hold her yet, and Joe didn’t try to hide the way his eyes misted up once she was safely in his arms. “I loved her already, from the moment I first knew she was a possibility, but to have her here, to be able to see her and touch her and take care of her, it’s more than I could ever have imagined,” he confessed, and Booker nodded, a little choked up as well. “I had forgotten what it was like, this kind of love, this feeling of awe that I had any part in making something so perfect.” He leaned up to kiss Joe, careful to keep space between their chests so that the baby wouldn’t be disturbed. 

Juliette had been fairly quiet other than that first bloodcurdling yell, but she started to fuss then, and Booker had to fight not to laugh at the utter look of panic on Nicky’s face, the way he ran his fingers through his hair in desperation. “Oh god, she’s unhappy and we don’t know what she needs, I’m already a bad father,” he fretted, and Booker reached over to squeeze his hand briefly. “Nico, it’s okay, it’s going to be fine. I know how you feel, because I felt like that with my first son. And it’s true that it gets easier once they’re able to talk and tell you exactly what they need, but we will manage just fine until then. The truth is, there aren’t that many reasons why babies cry, and we will have to just cycle through them until we figure out what is bothering her right at that minute.” He eyed the way Joe was instinctively trying to soothe her, to no avail, and reached for her. “I suspect she may be hungry in this case,” he explained, pulling the top of the robe to one side and smiling as she immediately latched on to one puffy nipple. “There you go, my darling,” he whispered, supporting her head as she nursed. “You were just hungry, weren’t you?” 

Joe and Nicky were watching avidly, their eyes wide. “It’s amazing how she knew just what to do,” Joe exclaimed. “Such a smart little girl already,” he added, beaming over at them. Booker privately thought that humanity wouldn’t have lasted very long if babies weren’t capable of figuring out how to feed themselves, but he definitely didn’t voice that out loud, because it was...really nice to see Joe so enthralled with their daughter, already eager to praise her accomplishments. 

“We’ll get better at reading her moods,” Booker promised them. “Soon you’ll be old hats at telling if she’s hungry or just tired.” He smiled. “And the day will come in a blink of an eye when she’s able to talk to us and ask for what she needs.” He ran his fingers through her hair—of which she had quite a lot, for a newborn, while Nicky got another panicked look on his face. “We—we didn’t even talk about what languages she’s going to learn! I should already be talking to her in Italian,” he worried, and Booker smiled reassuringly. “She should learn all of our languages, but there will be time for that, mon cher. Though if you want to start talking to her in Italian, go ahead, it can’t hurt.” 

Nicky kept up a steady stream of commentary in Italian after that, for as long as Juliette was nursing, and then finally she pulled off of Booker’s chest and promptly fell asleep. “Babies need so much sleep,” Joe whispered, and Booker opened his mouth to say something, but it came out as a yawn. “Sorry,” he muttered, and Nicky rolled his eyes. “As if you need to apologise for being tired, Booker, especially after you literally just gave birth to our daughter today. Sleep, amore; Joe and I will take care of her.” “Alright,” Booker agreed readily, barely able to keep his eyes open. “Love you, all three of you,” he murmured and Joe bent to kiss his forehead. “We love you too, sweetheart,” was the last thing Booker heard before he drifted into a dreamless sleep.


	16. Chapter 16

Together they hammered out some semblance of a routine over the first few weeks of Juliette’s life, and honestly it went much more smoothly than Booker had imagined. He remembered all the sleepless nights with his sons, and there were still some of those, but it seemed like either Joe or Nicky was always around to help him, and then there were his sisters as well. Andy, admittedly, looked unsure what to do with such a young baby on her own—Booker thought she would be more in her element once Juliette started walking and talking—but Nile was perfect with her, having taken care of several of her neighbour’s children when she was in high school, and Quynh was a natural with the baby as well. 

It wasn’t unusual, then, when he woke up, Joe and Nicky curled beside him, and heard a soft voice over the baby monitor from Juliette’s room. She was still sleeping every night in a crib beside he and Joe and Nicky, but they often took her into what would become her own bedroom during the day, slowly introducing her to her space and her toys. Booker stretched lazily, rolled to each side to press a kiss to both Joe and Nicky’s cheeks, and shrugged into a T-shirt, keeping his loose sleep pants on as he padded across the hall to Juliette’s room. 

He smiled widely when he saw her awake and alert in Nile’s arms, Nile keeping up a constant stream of chatter. She was currently going through all the figures in Joe’s mural, as if she were trying to help Juliette memorise them, and Booker stood in the doorway for a moment to watch. “See the lady with the short hair?” Nile asked, rocking back and forth in the rocking chair as Juliette gurgled happily. “That’s your Aunt Andy,” she explained. “She’s the one who helped you be born. She might look a bit mean, but she’s a big old softie, especially for your Aunt Quynh. Just don’t ask her how old she is, but she’s going to have plenty of stories to tell you. When you get older, I’m willing to bet you’ll be the best student in your history class,” Nile murmured, rubbing Juliette’s back lightly. “And there’s your papa and your babbo, right by your side like they always are, and your baba up in the tree, watching over you. Your baba painted this mural for you, he’s a very good artist, you know. He’s teaching me a bit but I’ll have to practice for five hundred years to get to be a fraction as good as him. Someday he can teach you, too,” Nile told the baby, showering her head with kisses.

Booker made a soft sound and Nile turned to face him, smiling. “Good morning,” she greeted, jostling Juliette a bit on her lap to get her attention and show her who had walked in. “Her papers came this morning, Copley sent a courier,” she told him, gesturing to a small pile on the dresser. Booker rifled through them briefly. An Italian birth certificate and a French passport, both made out to Juliette di Genova, the birth certificate with the names of his and Joe’s latest aliases on there as the parents. If Juliette lived as long as them, she would have a thousand passports under a thousand different names, but these were as close to her real identity as they could get, and it warmed his heart a bit to see them there, the proof that she was a real person, existing in the world. 

He set them down and went to crouch by the rocking chair, offering Juliette his finger to play with and grinning when she grabbed onto it and offered him a gummy smile. She didn’t react to any of them in particular yet, except for Booker, whom she always greeted with a smile and a happy coo. “Good morning, sweetheart,” he greeted her, taking her smoothly from Nile’s arms and lifting her up in the air, delighting in her little pleased noise. “Aunt Nile was telling you all about our family, huh?” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, inhaling her sweet baby scent. 

It was going to be a good day, he knew. He still had more than his share of bad days; he had had one when Juliette was about two weeks old and the sight of her just stirred up an outpouring of grief and sorrow that she would never get to meet her brothers, a deep-seated fear that someday he would lose her too. He had stayed in bed until after noon that day while the others took care of Juliette, curled into the covers that smelled of Joe and Nicky, his shame that he was unable to take care of his daughter that day driving him deeper into his spiralling unhappiness until Nicky came in and curled up beside him. “However long you need,” he whispered, holding Booker’s hand in his. “You have it. Joe took Juli out for a walk, you don’t have to worry about her, just take care of yourself. We’re here for you, Book.” It hadn’t fixed things immediately, but it had helped, and by dinner time he had joined the rest of the family at the table and he had been the one to put Juliette to bed.

This, though, was going to be a good day. It was already bright and sunny out and warmer than it had been for weeks, and he was filled with such hope as he rocked Juliette in his arms. “What do you say to your first big outing, ma puce? Want to go see Florence, one of my favourite cities?” Juliette gurgled in response and Booker laughed, rubbing her back a little. “I’ll take that as a yes, then. Come on, let’s go get your fathers before they sleep the whole day away.” He winked at Nile. “Thanks for taking care of her this morning.” Nile grinned back at him. “No trouble at all, I figured you needed your sleep, and I’m a morning person anyway. Marine habits die hard,” she admitted. Booker patted her on the shoulder. “You’re very welcome to come along to Florence with us, and Andy and Quynh too if you can convince them.” Nile smiled, tickling Juliette’s dangling feet. “I’d love to. I’ve always wanted to go to the Uffizi,” and Booker got a secret smile on his face at that. “Oh, we definitely have to go there,” he enthused. “Have a few things there I want to show you and Juliette both.” 

Nicky and Joe were awake when he got back to their room, but just barely, and Booker thought that he would never get over the sheer joy on their faces whenever they spotted Juliette. “Good morning, my princess,” Joe greeted her as Booker perched on the side of the bed, reaching out to stroke his fingers over her little hand, and leaned in to kiss Booker softly. “And good morning to you too.” Booker surprised himself by chasing another kiss as soon as their lips parted; he still had to remind himself, sometimes, that he could have this. Nicky gave him a look, and Booker chuckled, handing the baby to Joe so that he could scoot across the bed and give Nicky his own good morning kiss. As new and precious as things with Joe were, his blossoming relationship with Nicky filled him with even more awe, the way he got to watch Nicky fall a little bit in love with him each day. 

Booker pulled away reluctantly, smiling over at his daughter. “I promised our little girl an excursion today,” he explained. “You up for going to Florence?” Joe nodded right away, but Nicky’s lips thinned. “I want to, but...what if she gets too cold? Or too tired? Or—“ Booker kissed him again just to stop his fretting. “It’s not that cold today, and we’ll bundle her up in her warmest things, anyway. And she can ride in her carriage so she can sleep as much as she wants, and it’s only 45 minutes away on the train, so we can come home whenever if she’s really having trouble. It’ll be fine, Nico,” he assured him, and Nicky struggled with himself for a moment longer before he cracked a small smile. “Yes, okay, you’ve convinced me,” he agreed. He wasn’t quite as much of a mess as he had been in the first days of Juli’s life, but he did still worry a lot about her, and Booker and Joe were always happy to chime in with reassurance. 

It was quite convenient, really, having three parents, Booker thought as he played with Juliette while Joe showered and Nicky meticulously packed her diaper bag with everything she might possibly need. Then seamlessly they switched, Nicky going to get clean while Booker fed their daughter and Joe bought the train tickets online. Finally, the trio plus baby was ready, and Booker strapped Juliette to his chest in the baby sling he had come to love, while Nicky pushed the baby carriage for later. 

The three women were already waiting in the kitchen, Andy chugging coffee at an impressive rate. Nile was practically bouncing with excitement, and Booker offered her a fond smile. “When Juliette’s a bit older,” he promised her, “you can pick wherever you want to visit in the world and we’ll go there. One of the nice things about our long lives is the chance to see things you never dreamt you would be able to.” He patted the baby sling. “And I want her to see the world, too.” Juliette gave a huge yawn just then and Booker chuckled. “I know, my darling, traveling can be quite tiring, you’re right.”

Juliette slept the whole way on the train, giving Booker the time to ask Nile what she wanted to see in Florence. He didn’t have the heart to keep her from the Uffizi any longer than necessary, so they headed there first, while Quynh bowed out in the name of fashion, heading to a number of boutiques she had had her eye on. Booker let Nile guide them inside the museum at first, then, with a wink at his partners and Andy, steered her towards one room in particular. It took her a moment to notice, and then he saw her peering closer at one painting in particular, and Booker counted down the seconds with his fingers behind her back. She turned to Nicky, head tilted in confusion, and they all burst out laughing.

“Yes, it’s me,” Nicky admitted. “Nicky was quite the muse of the Renaissance,” Joe teased, ruffling his hair. “Come on, we’ll make a game out of it,” Booker encouraged. “We can play Find the Nicky. I think there’s at least 10 of him in this museum, plus a bonus Andy,” and Nile’s eyes just widened further. “By—by famous artists?” Booker winked. “Why don’t you wait and find out.” Juliette woke up just then, making a soft plaintive noise at the lack of attention, and he lifted her out of the carriage, strapping her back into the sling again and running his fingers through her constantly-growing halo of curls. “Look, Juliette,” he whispered to her in French. “It’s your babbo, many many years ago. Before papa was even born.” Juliette smiled obediently, though admittedly that was probably more because she was nestled up against his chest again than because she had recognised her father.

In the end, they found 11 Nickys, an Andy, and a maybe-Joe before they got too hungry to search anymore. They had panini from a small place near the Ponte Vecchio, sitting by the riverside in the sun, and Joe and Nicky took turns telling Juliette (and, by extension, Nile, who was listening much more attentively) the history of all the buildings around them. 

When they got up after their lunch, Nicky nudged Booker. “I can carry her for a little while, you know. You don’t always have to be the one who carries her around,” he added with a soft smile, and it was true, Booker had unconsciously fallen into his old omega habits. “What do you think, Juli?” He asked, laughing a bit at the funny face she made. “Want to ride with babbo for a little while?” Carefully, he shifted her over, smiling as she settled against Nicky’s chest.

Nicky and Joe led them through the winding streets to show them the Duomo and, nearby, a house they had lived in briefly in the 1500s; they walked up to Piazzale Michelangelo to see the view of the city, with Nicky groaning at Nile’s teasing as they walked through the San Niccolo neighbourhood. They met up with Quynh to stroll through the Boboli Gardens, smiling indulgently as she showed them all of the new outfits she had bought, including a little dress for Juliette. They settled on a cafe terrace to watch the sunset and have a drink, the moment peaceful until Juliette started fussing. “You want to go home, don’t you?” Booker asked, wiping away her tears and pressing kisses to her cheeks. “You did great, sweetheart, I know it was a long day. Your first big outing, I know you’re tired. We’ll take the next train home, my love,” he promised her, signalling the waiter for the check.

“I need to make a doctor’s appointment,” Booker remarked as they waited for the train home, and Nicky and Joe both looked at him in alarm. “I’m fine,” he reassured them quickly. “Just...” he bit his lip. “Before, I got my first heat about three months after each of my sons was born. I don’t know if it’ll work the same now, since I haven’t had a heat cycle at all in so long, but just in case, I wanted to get a prescription for birth control because I wanted to ask you to spend my next heat with me, if you wanted.” He smiled fondly down at Juliette. “And, well, as much as we love her, I don’t think we’re ready for another little one so soon.” He turned his shy grin on the other two men, letting himself be pulled into a tight hug by Joe. “Though maybe someday, before too long.” “Someday,” Nicky agreed, wrapping his own arm around both Booker and Joe, pulling them plus Juliette in for an embrace. “We have all the time in the world.” They did, Booker thought, relaxing into the simple joy of being held close to his family, this precious second chance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I think that’s a good place to end this particular story—though there will absolutely be more of their adventures with Juliette! I need to think of whether I want to start a proper sequel or more some little vignettes of their lives together, but no matter what form it takes, there will be more. Hope you enjoyed and please pass on any special requests/ideas of what moments of their lives you would like to see in future!


End file.
